


Cold Little Heart

by Laurie



Series: Cold Little Heart [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Dark, Hurt Aziraphale (Good Omens), Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), I promise I did, I tried to write something light and funny, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Millennial pining, Post-Canon, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Protective Crowley, Slow Burn, Swearing, completed story hell yeah, like 6000-thousand years slow, lots and lots of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-05-16 06:18:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19312348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurie/pseuds/Laurie
Summary: There’s a monster in his chest. For all the holiness and love and happiness surrounding his very existence, that plain fact remains undisputable: Aziraphale has a monster in his chest.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now here I am, thinking - how nice would It be to write a light funny fit for these two wonderful characters in a fandom that's so light and funny and devoid of any drama! I shall try my best to write one such story!
> 
> So there you are, 5000 words of pure unadulterated angst and heavy drama, just what none of you needed or asked for! No need to thank me (I'm joking, of course - there's always, always a need to thank me).
> 
> This is based rather more on the telly show than the book, as I read it quite a long time ago now, so there might be some errors and inconsistencies. Beware.
> 
> Cheers. I hope at least one person enjoys this.
> 
> NOW WITH BEAUTIFUL AMAZING ART BY LUNARSHOPE112!!!!  
> https://www.deviantart.com/lunarshope112/art/Cold-Little-Heart-805188740

_Now._

On a cloudy Thursday, Aziraphale is coming up to the door of Crowley’s flat and Crowley is a _filthy lying cheating whore_ – or at least that’s what a dishevelled girl says, hurrying out of Crowley’s flat with tears and make-up running down her face. She passes Aziraphale on her way out and shoots him a dirty look full of so much hatred, it feels like a punch in the stomach. He flinches.

Crowley is inside, sprawled in his ridiculous throne-like chair. He lifts his eyebrows.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he comments.

“Whatever have you done to that poor lady?” Aziraphale inquires, concerned. There’s a nagging low in his stomach, scratching and crawling, like an animal trying to get out.

“Nothing she wasn’t warned of beforehand,” Crowley says carelessly, waving a graceful hand in the air. “I swear, though, _women…_ six thousand years and they haven’t learnt anything _._ ”

“Ah, and here you are, ever so eager to educate,” Aziraphale says coldly. The nagging in his stomach grows and stretches, the animal inside him pacing and clenching its teeth.

Crowley gives him a quick look-over.

“What’s up with you, then?”

“Nothing is “ _up_ ” with me, as you put it,” Aziraphale says, not able to make his tone less haughty than it is. He bites his lip, looks around the flat. Nothing has changed here in decades, not since he was here for the first time almost sixty years ago now.

“Okay,” Crowley drawls, in a tone that suggests he knows more than he lets on. Aziraphale is starting to get annoyed, thinks _oh, if he’s going to be like that…_ He is not sure of why he’s come here in the first place, and now is especially uncertain he should have done at all. He turns on his heels.

“Well, I’ll be going then.”

Crowley frowns.

“Wait, wait, what the hell?” He gets up from his chair, ridiculously graceful as if a movement was a part of some choreographed dance. Aziraphale can’t quite help glancing away.

“It’s nothing, I’ve just come to see if you were up for some lunch,” Aziraphale mumbles, his eyes resting firmly on the plants at the corner of the room. The animal inside him shifts and turns, restless, anxious. “But I see you’re, ah, otherwise occupied.”

“She’s just left, hasn’t she?” Crowley says incredulously, looking at him with a rather strange expression, as Aziraphale risks a glance at him. “You’ve got my undivided attention, angel!”

There’s silence that drags on for just a bit too long. Aziraphale looks around the room, glances at the window at the lively restless city outside. His heart is hammering away in his chest and he doesn’t understand what’s got him so worked up. He breathes out slowly, getting the animal in his chest to calm down and back off.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley says again, quiet and intense. In the silence of the room, Aziraphale can hear the leaves rustling outside, the distant noise of the traffic, the sounds of the city being vibrant and alive.

He looks at Crowley standing there, all wiry and barely-contained energy, leaning on the back of his chair. His face is open and expression conflicted, and he is chewing on his lower lip – a habit that’s gone on since the dawn of time. He takes a tiny step forward, his hand jerking up as if to touch Aziraphale but stops in the air and drops back to his side. Aziraphale finds himself wishing to take a few stops towards him, wishing to be closer, wishing to touch, to feel, to mess him up, _to wreck him_

He takes a small step back instead.

“I’m fine,” he says, even though Crowley hasn’t asked him. Aziraphale’s known him long enough to hear the question anyway. “I’m just… I’t… It’s nothing, I’m fine.”

Crowley looks anything but convinced. “If you say so,” he concedes. The strange choking moment is gone with the wind.

“Well, are you up to lunch, then?” Aziraphale asks him brightly and wonders why on earth he has come here in the first place. He desperately wishes he hadn’t.

“Sure, I’m up,” Crowley says, and there’s something sad and something final in his tone. Aziraphale’s animal is seemingly asleep now somewhere low in his stomach.

Together, they step outside. Neither of them mentions that afternoon again.

 

***

 

Aziraphale does his best to embrace himself just as he is, and he succeeds most of the time. It’s easy to be happy and loving and ever-forgiving when happiness and love and forgiveness is what he’s made up of, what he’s made up for.

He loves his expensive bright clothing, he loves his various delicious foods, his ever-changing cuisine, his ancient books and his shop, and most of the time he is happy, and he is content.

Sometimes, though, it is just not enough.

There’s a monster in his chest. For all the holiness and love and happiness surrounding his very existence, that plain fact remains undisputable: Aziraphale has a monster in his chest.

At times, it’s quiet and calm, and he can barely feel it there, content to keep on with his life; other times it’s roaring and clawing – a predator ready to pounce and tear and wreck. Somewhere between blessing the neighbours in the late sixteenth century and trying to keep the Jews alive in the forties, the monster sprung up in his chest and never left.

Aziraphale’s gone an impressive amount of time ignoring it. One dead teenager and a couple of buildings in ruins later, Aziraphale knows ignoring it is not something he could continue to indulge in.

He can’t quite put a finger on it, this feeling when the monster is awake and awaiting. It’s rather something he wouldn’t like dwelling on – the coldness, the misery, the despair. When it comes, the air turns stale and he suffocates, and his heart feels as though there are mice skittering in it. The monster roars and claws at his insides, discomfort that gradually turns to burning, which in turn becomes hot searing pain in every nerve of his fragile human body. It’s demanding, the monster is, and it’s hungry, and it needs to feel pain, to feed on pain, to feed on misery and horror; it needs to break and wreck and burn.

 _How about we go somewhere nice and warm, huh?_ Crowley suggests one time, when he notices Aziraphale acting strange, fighting the good fight with his monster. Crowley’s always been good at that – at _noticing._ Aziraphale might try as he might to hide this thing, to pretend it’s not there, but Crowley’s eyes are sharp as ever, and there’s no hiding from _him_.

 _We could go to Hawaii, you know, lay on the beach all day, have drinks with little umbrellas in them,_ Crowley says another time, as Aziraphale’s hand grabs at his own chest, as if afraid his heart is going to fall out if he doesn’t. The shop around him is a mess, books scattered everywhere – rumpled and torn, half of the ceiling lying in heaps of stone and dust on the floor. Crowley’s worried face is staring at him with something akin to fear in his eyes, Crowley’s steady hand on his shoulder, grounding him, keeping him in check. Too late for that, though.

Aziraphale ignores him. He can’t ignore the monster, and he’s learned to make concessions a long time ago. There’s no point tearing himself up over the things he can’t control, and so he doesn’t. There’s always an option to ignore Crowley’s worried energy, though. Making concessions can only go so far.

Aziraphale just needs to get his head straight. He needs to breathe and keep himself in line, and when the animal inside him rolls to its feet, prowling forward, growling low, he just needs to get his head straight.

He never tells Crowley, never dares mention it to him out loud. Crowley wouldn’t understand anyway.

 

***

_1793._

“Why are you here?” Aziraphale says upon seeing Crowley’s bespectacled face near his table.

“I’m great, old friend, thanks for asking! How are you?” Crowley says incredulously, as he pulls a chair from a table nearby and invites himself to sit down next to Aziraphale.

“Stop saying that, please!” Aziraphale exclaims, uncomfortable and oddly ashamed, looking around frantically to see if anyone nearby could hear them. When he turns back to face Crowley, there’s no expression on the demon’s face.

“Stop saying what? “ _Friend_?” He says in twisted tone. “I’m only being fucking civil, Aziraphale, you lot should try that sometime.”

“Don’t swear,” Aziraphale admonishes coldly.

Crowley looks like he wants to say something else, undoubtedly something witty and cruel, but holds his tongue instead. Aziraphale thinks he sees something red flash behand the man’s sunglasses. He looks away.

“So I’ve been sent to Paris,” Crowley says after a while. He looks squeamish. Aziraphale stills with his fork half-way up to his mouth, then puts it back down on the plate.

“So?” He says _civilly_. Crowley huffs, irritated, and Aziraphale sees a flash of his white teeth.

“ _So,_ I assumed that you have been, too.”

Indeed, Aziraphale has been. The war in France has been going on for quite a while now, and, of course, sooner or later the call would have had to come. As much as he hates to admit it, he’s never been one for bravery, so he typically tries to avoid going to a war zone where the air smells of blood and misery, and pure mind-numbing terror is never far behind. Still, there’s no way Aziraphale is passing that on to Crowley of all beings.

“I have been, yes,” he says carefully. “What did you have on your mind, then?”

Crowley shifts in his seat, winces, as if he has a particularly bad toothache. He looks strangely in place in this posh fancy restaurant in the heart of London, looks like he belongs. With vague jealousy, Aziraphale thinks there might not be a place in the world where Crowley wouldn’t look like he belonged.

Aziraphale looks at him, really takes him in.

Crowley is sprawled in a chair with an air of someone who owns the place. His hair falls to his shoulders like fluid, the colour of the sun that’s about to hit the line of the horizon. He is tall and thin and deceptively frail, a creature with too much strength and energy to contain in a fragile and mortal human body. The candlelight dances in the reflection on his glasses like tiny little stars in the night sky. He is bright and fiery and brash, and Aziraphale gets it – understands, why the whole human world wants to look at him and never take its eyes off.

Aziraphale wants to never take his eyes off.

“Well, I thought,” Crowley pauses, clears his throat awkwardly, then takes his glasses off, and Aziraphale is shaken out from the strange haze. He focuses on Crowley’s words. “I thought you could take this one for both of us.”

“Alright,” Aziraphale agrees, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “And?”

“And, maybe, ah, maybe you could, you know,” Crowley mumbles, voice going so quiet Aziraphale struggles to hear it. Crowley looks positively wild now, eyes darting back and forth around the dining hall. His fingers fidget with the glasses in his hands. “Maybe you could do your thing and, um, _forgo_ my thing.”

Aziraphale looks at his hellish yellow eyes, tilts his head, as if that could help him better understand the person in front of him. There’s a softness in the lines of Crowley’s face that he’s never noticed before; distantly, he wonders if it’s always been there.

“What are you saying, Crowley?” He says, much softer, as he searches Crowley’s conflicted face.

“All I’m saying is you’re a big boy, and you’ll do fabulous without me wasting my time there as well,” Crowley grumbles and fidgets with the glasses shackle.

“You asked me to “forgo your thing,” Aziraphale says gently. There’s something painful in Crowley’s expression, in his whole body, something wild-scared-shameful that bubbles in his eyes, around the hard line of his mouth. “ _Why_?”

“Because I don’t want to make it any worse than it already fucking is!” Crowley snaps, so loudly that several gentlemen a few tables down stop eating and turn to look at him, scandalized. Aziraphale makes them forget what they’ve heard with an impatient flick of his finger. He is solely focused on the person in front of him – squirming in his place, trying to make himself smaller, lesser than he obviously is.

Something warm and tender rushes all over Aziraphale, from the centre of his chest to the tips of his fingers, so raw and powerful that the candles all around them flicker and flare up like wildfire. The monster in his chest awakes and whimpers, clawing at his insides.

Crowley avoids meeting his eyes, looking miserable and pained, and Aziraphale suddenly burns with a desire to reach out and touch him, comfort him. But it’s not something he could or would ever do, and so he doesn’t. His hands stay unmovable in their place, burning and useless.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says gently, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “Have you maybe come to care for the humans after all?”

“Shut up!” Crowley snarls, face going red and blotchy. He looks guilty, like a five-year-old caught with his hand going down the biscuit tin. Aziraphale finds him ridiculously beautiful at the moment. His monster whines, then quiets down. “Whatever for would they need my input anyway? They manage to be torturous murderous bastards on their own just fine!”

Aziraphale’s body cools down some. He doesn’t like thinking about it, doesn’t care to acknowledge the darker, more terrifying side to humans’ souls, that’s about the most gruesome and eerie thing he’s ever encountered. He prefers not dwelling on that when he can help it.

“They are not so bad,” he says instead, and Crowley bristles.

“Oh for the love of—You’ll see!” he whispers vehemently, hands flying about. Rage and pain and guilt come off him in waves. “One day you’ll take off your lovey-dovey fucking glasses and you’ll _really see_!”

Before Crowley gets too worked up, Aziraphale hurries to interject: “Alright, alright, I’ll do it. I’ll go.”

There’s something very much like relief painted all over Crowley’s ancient features.

 

***

 

_1985._

“I come bearing gifts,” Crowley announces as he steps into the shop, loud enough to startle an old lady customer into dropping the heavy tome she’s been reading.

Aziraphale looks up from his desk, mood lifting already as he sees the tall wiry figure strut into the shop.

Crowley is holding a paper bag in his hand, which says “ _Craden’s Crepes_ ” on it, which isn’t unusual, but what stands out is the expression on his face – pure, unadulterated joy.

Aziraphale’s heart is beating faster suddenly, as he almost wants to squint at Crowley’s happy joyous glow to protect his eyes. Crowley raises his arm, waving the paper bag in his hand like a flag in Aziraphale’s face, exaggeratedly proud of himself, red hair sticking up in places they shouldn’t be, as if his mirth itself has electrified it.

“Look, look,” he keeps saying, shoving the bag with crepes under Aziraphale’s nose, and he can actually smell the warm fresh pastry inside, the smell so strong it only gives way to the smell of Crowley’s happiness itself – fresh like the air after a storm and hot as the sun-baked ground. Aziraphale wants to bottle it up and keep it to himself – the smell of Crowley being happy, as beautiful and rare as a true godly miracle.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Aziraphale says, smiling, taking in the sight in front of him, committing it to memory. The old lady in the corner might as well have not existed for all the notice he gives her.

And suddenly, his mind takes him to the moments when Crowley was the opposite of what he looks like this instance, and he remembers the gutter, the nasty mess of blankets, plants, dried out from thirst – discoloured and dead, and the myriad of sticky bloody syringes, some lying around and some sticking out of Crowley’s pale lifeless arm.

He remembers, and then – the _thing_ wakes up inside him.

Aziraphale feels it stretching, coming up, growing bigger. It feels like something huge and hard sometimes, like a beast of a lion with sharp teeth and long claws and pointy horns – a creature from Hell itself, and sometimes like a small birdlike being, its beak knife-like and its wings bigger than like itself.

It’s always deadly and always hungry, and that never changes.

He plasters a smile on his face, wooden and painful, pretends nothing extreme is happening inside his own body.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Crowley says immediately, because he always notices, doesn’t he?

All of a sudden, he wants to cry.

“Out!” Crowley snaps at the woman with the book. Aziraphale barely hears it through the white noise in his ears, the effort it takes to keep the beast down. The world around him feels surreal and ethereal, even more so as he watches distantly as Crowley takes the scared woman by the shoulders and forces her out of the shop.

There’s a loud bang – the door must have closed. Footsteps – Crowley must be still here.

“Aziraphale?”

He stumbles forward, almost falls, cotton legs pretty much giving up on him, as the thing rages and thrashes in his chest, and he hates and hates and hates himself for his cowardice and his predominant self-interest that have prevented him from dealing with this _defect_ when he should have.

“Aziraphale!”

Opening his eyes he had no idea were shut, he zeroes in on Crowley’s face so near his, Crowley’s hands gripping his shoulders. Slowly, panting hard, his breath swooshing in and out of his mouth, he straightens out. His entire body hurts, and he stumbles forward, breath hitching, as he the haze and fog clear out around him, and he sees shattered glass everywhere around the pair of them. It’s almost pitch-dark in the shop around them, and he thinks _ah, here we go_ as he sees the many broken lightbulbs swooshing in slowing circles off the ceiling.

“You mind telling me what that was about?” Crowley says, tone too light and casual to be sincere. “If you wanted a more intimate lighting, you should have only said so.”

The sarcasm cuts through him like a knife, and Aziraphale sobers up almost instantly.

“Ah, look at all those lights,” He says loudly, fake and overly concerned.

Funny, how one minute ago he couldn’t stand himself for keeping his problem hidden from Crowley and the world. Now, in the light of day, with no glass exploding over his head and no immediate danger posed to any humans present, it’s surprisingly easy to fall back into the good old patterns.

“Would you just stop bullshitting me for a minute?!” Crowley explodes, hands up high in the air, spit flying from his mouth. Aziraphale swallows down the panic along the bile rising up his throat, refusing to even entertain the thought of Crowley knowing just how _defected_ he is.

Crowley wouldn’t understand.

Aziraphale just needs to get his head straight. That’s all.

“My dear friend, I wouldn’t even dream of it!” He exclaims, words tasting like bile in his mouth. He risks a glance at his friend, who’s lost his glasses somewhere along the line of getting Aziraphale to stop ruining his shop and is now looking at him with an expression of such raw hurt, Aziraphale’s heart breaks a little.

“Fine,” Crowley spits out, and turns on his heels. In an instance, he’s gone, the crepes and the warm wonderful smell gone with him.

 _That’s alright_ , Aziraphale thinks, as he’s swiping the broken glass off the floor, _that’s alright_.

_Crowley wouldn’t understand, anyway._

 

***

 

_1944._

In the cold light of morning, the sight before him is even more unbearable and horrifying than ever, almost surreal in its absolute atrocity.

Quickly, as to not stop and dwell on the sight of the broken skeleton-like bodies discarded in heaps and heaps like rotten apples everywhere around, Aziraphale makes his way to the nearest barrack on unsteady wavering legs.

The smell inside is unbearable. He miracles it away, so to not be distracted.

The children are the worst, of course they are. For all the time he’s been here, ha can’t quite come to terms with the way the children here look more like sick hungry coyotes, hiding in the dark, to ill and too weak to come out to the light of day.

Not that he has quite come to terms with any of this, really.

He pats their small shaved head, wills them to dream about something good, something nice, for all he doubts they can even remember what nice feels like, can recall the concept of the word.

He heals their wounds, the best he can. Even he has limits.

He moves on to the adults, stuffed together with no air between them – five and six people in a space hardly enough for one. They whine and whimper in the sleep, and so he wills their nightmares away, too, mends their pestering wounds. He can’t really help in a way that would actually matter, but Aziraphale learned to make concessions a long time ago.

Not that it was his choice to make, in the first place, but there’s no point in thinking about that, and so he doesn’t. He moves on to the next barrack instead.

After what feels like an eternity and thousands and thousands of starved dehumanized and degraded people later, Aziraphale makes his way off the premises. He leans against the cold unforgiving stone wall near the entrance gate, watches the Germans walk about, preparing for yet another day of unthinkable human cruelty. It takes about all of the energy he has left to keep himself hidden from their eyes.

“ _Arbeit macht frei_ ,” Says a familiar voice right next to him. He lifts his head, sees Crowley standing not two meters away from him, reading out loud the sign above the entrance. “That’s definitely something Dagon must’ve come up with! I swear, the way she runs her department-”

“Stop it. Just stop it.”

Crowley looks up at him, startled, and his eyes widen almost comically. Aziraphale hasn’t even realized he’s said it out loud, for all the energy he has left is barely enough to keep himself upright and standing.

“Angel,” Crowley says slowly, tentatively. There’s a deep line going down between his eyebrows, as he frowns at Aziraphale. “You look…”

His voice fades out, but Aziraphale hears it anyway.

 _Like shit,_ his mind supplies blankly, _like absolute shit_.

“Wait till you see the humans in there,” He says feebly, shoulder jerking towards the barracks he’s just left.

“But you’re an angel,” Crowley says carefully, as if talking to a very dim-witted child. “Why don’t you--”

“Because I’m exhausted, Crowley,” Aziraphale lets out, closes his eyes. His head hurts, his body is killing him, his very bones feel frail and ancient.

“But surely you can…”

“No, I can’t,” he says again, words tasting like ash in his mouth.

They stand there in heavy woollen silence.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Aziraphale says, just before a horrible painful thought comes to his mind. The beast in his chest stirs, stretches out. “Is that _your_ handiwork – what’s going on here?!”

Crowley stills, mouth falling open in shock.

“ _What?”_

“ _Did you do this_?” Aziraphale demands, too exhausted, too hurt and detached to censor anything that comes out of his mouth.

“I can’t believe you’d fucking say that!” Crowley yells, and distantly Aziraphale worries about someone hearing them, before he remembers no one could actually notice them.

“Well, I couldn’t believe people could do what they are doing here on a regular basis, but I reckon, every day we learn something new.”

It’s harsh, and it’s uncalled for, Aziraphale realizes that as soon as the words leave his mouth. He winces, rubs his eyes, the bridge of his nose. The animal inside him flaps its wings, croaks, then still again.

“I’m sorry, Crowley,” he murmurs, noticing the way his hands are shaking. He stills them at his sides. “I apologize, I didn’t really mean it.”

Of course, he didn’t. He hopes he knows Crowley too well by now to know that even the thought of the things happening behind these walls would never _ever_ cross Crowley’s mind.

Crowley still looks offended, but then his expression softens. He shifts his weight on his other leg, bites on his lip.

“When was the last time you, um, _ate_?” He asks quietly. Aziraphale blinks at him hazily.

“What?”

“Well, you look… nevermind,” he shifts again, looking extremely uncomfortable and out of place. _This is it,_ Aziraphale thinks vaguely through the bone-deep exhaustion, _this is it, this is the place where Crowley doesn’t belong._

“Do you at least sleep? At all?” Crowley says again.

Aziraphale lets out a wet breath. He normally tries hard to not get annoyed by Crowley but now he feels the effort not worthy considering.

“Never you mind that I don’t actually require sleep, being an Angel of God, and I do know you’re only a demon, which makes it impossible for you to understand, but how do you suppose I would indulge in such a luxury while every second of every minute there are thousands – no, _tens, hundreds of thousands –_ of people I must be helping to survive instead?!”

He is shouting by the end of it. Crowley’s face loses all expression.

“So what does the Almighty have to say about all of that, then?” He asks shrewdly, eyes narrowing, as he hits the sore spot.

Aziraphale shuts his eyes. He has no answer for that, and Crowley knows that, naturally.

“Has She given any reasons for why She’s allowed all this to go on for so long? Has She bothered to explain Herself to any of you?” Crowley is saying heatedly, eyes almost snake-like slits now. Dark ugly sarcasm is dripping from his voice, like a bucket of ice-cold water in a heated summer day. “Or is it all still a part of _The_ _Ineffable Plan?_ ”

“Shut the fuck up,” sharp, like a bullet chambered.

His voice comes out raspy and croaky. It shuts Crowley up, at least.

The monster in his chest stretches out its wings, rustles its tail. It’s miserable and it’s hungry, and Aziraphale can’t help it with either.

He hasn’t sworn in almost six thousand years. He can’t believe he’s been so stupidly provoked into it by Crowley of all bloody creatures.

“So I see, then, still blindly following the orders, like a good little angel soldier,” Crowley hisses, something ugly in his expression.

“I don’t just blindly do anything,” Aziraphale protests weakly, all energy to fight leaking out of him, like air from a balloon. “I still do everything in my power to help, in any way that I can.”

“Oh, do you? Let me guess – miracling them fluffy dreams with unicorns and rainbows? Mending their shoes and scratches? Am I close?” He says cruelly. At Aziraphale’s silence, he huffs out an unkind laugh. “How about some _real_ help, _oh Mighty Angel_?”

“What- what do you mean?” Aziraphale mumbles, the beast chewing on his insides, a steady searing pain in his chest, that slowly spreads to his every limb.

He knows what Crowley’s getting at, of course he does. It’s not like he hasn’t considered it a million times himself.

“You know what I mean, don’t pretend otherwise!” Crowley accuses, eyes boring into his. “Those Nazi soldiers torturing thousands of people each, day in and day out! You know what to do!”

The implication of what he’s saying upsets every organ in Aziraphale’s old tired body. The beast wouldn’t stop eating away at him.

“I can’t!” he screams out, desperately, brokenly, because isn’t that the sad ugly truth he recognizes in Crowley’s scathing words. “I’m an angel, Crowley, you know I can’t… _kill_ anything!”

“Can’t or won’t?” Crowley spits out, taking a step closer to him, the monster inside Aziraphale is rampaging, chopping pieces of him away – one minute at a time – and soon there won’t be anything of him left. He just wants to stop this, needs this to end, now, and the electric wires at the top of the tall fences are now buzzing dangerously, but Crowley’s not done, oh no. “You’re _pathetic_. You pretend you’re doing some important God’s work, when in reality you might as well be wiping those Nazi’s arses--”

“Why don’t you do it, then?” Aziraphale yells, the volume of his voice getting disproportionally loud as Crowley’s getting quieter by the second. “Why show up here at all, Crowley? To give me a lecture on God’s plans? _Please!”_

Crowley is startled into momentary silence, and that’s all Aziraphale needs to push on.

“You are a demon, Crowley! You’re supposed to do things like that! What did you think would happen if you came here?!”

“Don’t try to push your dirty work on me!” Crowley hisses, poisonous. His whole face contorts, like he’s having a stroke. “Just because you’re just too much of coward to do it yourself!”

The words feel like a punch low in his gut, and Aziraphale flinches, barely there to make his shaky legs hold him. The truth is out there, ugly and bigger than life. His hands are twitching and trembling wildly.

“I can’t do it, Crowley, you know I can’t! You’re the one up to this, don’t you see it? Doing it would destroy my soul!” Aziraphale yells, desperately, painfully.

“Well, what about MY SOUL?! _MY SOUL, AZIRAPHALE?!”_ Crowley roars, the volume of his voice shaking up Aziraphale’s very being. The beast in him roars back.

“You’re a bloody demon, Crowley, _it’s not as if you fucking well had one!!”_

Crowley flinches, as if hit by an invisible fist. His mouth slams shut with a loud _clack._ He stares at Aziraphale with an unreadable expression, their heavy panting the only sound between them.

“ _Fuck. You_.” Crowley hisses finally, and the venom in his words would’ve killed a lesser being.

Before Aziraphale can say anything back, fix it in any way at all, Crowley is gone just like that.

The next day, the camp wakes up without six of its general officers at once. The higher-ups are too unsure to declare them dead just like that, but they are… gone.

The day after that, Berlin sends in eight new ones.

Aziraphale doesn’t think about it. These days he doesn’t think about anything at all, really, not anymore. He does his job, he helps the people who has no one but him to take the modicum of their pain away, and he thinks of nothing at all.

The monster inside him is silent and unmoving.

He doesn’t see Crowley for years again.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

_Now._

Aziraphale doesn’t step foot in Crowley’s flat after that encounter. Seeing the crying human girl leaving Crowley’s place has bothered him much more than he cares to admit, and he avoids seeing Crowley for a week after that.

Naturally, Crowley comes to see him, instead.

As it typically does these days, Aziraphale’s heart is immediately bursting upon the sight of him.

He’s on his fourth glass of wine, as the door bell jinks, announcing Crowley’s presence. He sets the glass on his desk, wills his galloping heart to slow down, looks up at his best and only friend in the world.

“Haven’t seen much of you lately,” Crowley says as a way of welcome. Aziraphale flushes, hands jerking slightly.

“I’ve been busy with, um, with the store,” he mumbles stupidly, for even he knows it’s a weak attempt at lying as soon as it leaves his mouth.

“Mm-hmm,” is all Crowley says. He is staring at Aziraphale with his one eyebrow high above his sunglasses. Aziraphale looks down at his book, not really seeing the words at all.

“So what have you been up to, my friend?” he says chirpily, forcing the unwanted image of Crowley and the nameless girl out of his mind. Crowley walks up to his desk, miracles another chair for himself and plops down on it.

“Well, I went to visit Adam couple of days ago,” Crowley says casually, head tilted up, and Aziraphale can’t quite see his eyes behind the glasses. “The lad was wondering why the hell _my friend_ had missed out on our little monthly reunion.” He gazes back at Aziraphale, looking rather like a lawyer on one of those American telly shows who’s just made an undeniable argument against the opposing side. Aziraphale hears the accusation in his voice just fine.

“Well, it’s not like you’ve mentioned anything about going there, is it?” Aziraphale argues back weakly. He knows the argument is lost before he even starts it, though.

“ _Well_ , it’s not like you’ve been answering my calls or haven’t been trying to avoid me all week, _is it?”_ Crowley fires back. Both of his eyebrows are up now, almost reaching his hairline.

“It’s not—I wasn’t—” Aziraphale babbles, feeling his face going ever so hot.

“Of course, you weren’t,” Crowley mutters, sad and resigned, as he takes off his glasses. His eyes bore into Aziraphale’s.

A brief, oddly detailed image of Crowley touching his cheek comes to his mind all of a sudden. _I know everything that you are,_ dream-Crowley tells him, running his thumb along the line of Aziraphale’s jaw. He looks at Aziraphale with such honest affection, such earth-shaking warmth and love that all wind is knocked out of him. _You can’t hide from me._

His desk quakes and trembles under him, his unfinished wine spilling out from the glass, as the monster wakes up. The vision evaporates.

Christ, maybe Aziraphale does need to ease up on the wine, after all. Makes him imagine the stupidest things.

“I’m sorry,” he says quickly in a feeble attempt to cover up the sudden burst of energy that’s washed over them like a tsunami wave. There’s no way Crowley could have missed it. “I’m sorry,” he says again and forces himself to meet Crowley’s familiar yellow eyes, gazing at him with such sadness and hurt from across his desk. “I just needed some time, some time to think… What with the apocalypse and all…”

Apocalypse that never happened three months ago now. Aziraphale never swears, but there’s no harm in indulging in the privacy of his own mind: he’s just so full of _shit._

Crowley is silent as he keeps looking at him, and the silence grows heavy and thick around them, as the familiar sense of anxiety wraps around Aziraphale like and old woollen blanket, gone soft with age.

Then Crowley sighs and lets out a long hot breath. He seems to be in the midst of some deep internal struggle, and Aziraphale can sympathize.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley says in a tone that bears no messing around. The temperature in the room suddenly seems to have dropped a few degrees around them. “You are my best friend, and I care about you, you know that, right?”

Aziraphale looks around. The store is empty. It’s almost always empty, except for the occasional rare customer, who typically seems to have wandered in by mistake, and the two of them, sitting next to other, wining and dining and talking about everything and nothing. It’s empty now, but his monster might as well be sitting right between them, for all the heavy desperate sense of presence he’s giving off.

Aziraphale swallows past the bitter cotton ball in his throat, squeezes his burning eyes shut. He can’t quite know the trouble Crowley must have gone through to allow himself to admit such a thing out loud, for the world to hear. And Crowley is just sitting there, looking small and vulnerable and alone.

Body tight and frozen, eyes burning and hands shaking, Aziraphale can only nod curtly in response.

“Then why don’t you tell me what on earth is going on with you?” Crowley says, so quietly – it’s barely there.

“What?” Aziraphale squeaks, his voice coming back. He is blinking fast. “Nothing is going on, my dear friend, whatever do you mean?”

“Fuck, Aziraphale!” Crowley yells suddenly, jumping to his feet like a ball of vehement nervous energy. His voice is too loud among the stacks and stacks of ancient books, against the old wooden walls and thin frail windows. Aziraphale flinches, startled, unable to tear his eyes away from him. “Can you just—Can you just stop lying to me? For one second, just for a fucking second, can you be bloody honest with me?!”

It’s not as if this is something that hasn’t been long coming. If anything, Aziraphale is amazed it took Crowley this long to confront him, although, he’s even more amazed at the manner of the confrontation itself. For one, he never imagined any yelling or grand admissions of feelings, either way.

“Just tell me, Aziraphale! You can yell at me, you can punch me in face, do whatever you damn please, but just let me fucking know what’s wrong! Quit with the brooding self-righteous gimmick already!” There’s a new sort of desperation in his voice, loud and raspy and wet. And Aziraphale wants to, he really, really does, but then – in his long, never-ending life he rarely ever gets to have what he wants.

“Honestly, Crowley, there’s nothing—"

“Oh, _oooohh,_ ” Crowley whooshes out, sarcasm heavier than a ton of bricks. “Sure, right, it’s all _tip-top!_ ” He pauses, huffing out an angry little sound, twists his lips. “Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m _thick_? Do you just fancy me a well idiot, Aziraphale, is that what this is?” His voice breaks, hoarse and small underneath the cutting sarcasm. “Or is it just that you don’t care to bother with me – I’m _only a demon_ , after all, not even graced with a fucking soul for you to—”

“ _Crowley!_ ” Aziraphale rasps out, appalled. He never imagined just how much he must have hurt Crowley then, that one horrible day in Poland more than seventy years ago, for him to remember it still, bring it up now, for the first time since that awful argument all those decades ago. They’ve never mentioned it since, and Aziraphale has been sure Crowley’s forgotten all about it, the words yelled out in the cold light of uncaring dusty sun.

Turns out he’s been quite mistaken, and the conversation is spinning rapidly and wildly out of his control. The book shelf behind them shakes and explodes into a myriad of tiny pieces, paper flying around like magical snowstorm.

He never asked Crowley what happened to those Nazi officers. He knows he never will.

“Crowley, _please!”_ he yells, trying to outshout the demon. Crowley looks like nothing he’s ever seen him – shaken, desperate, hurt, raw, open, vehement, positively wild. “Please, my dear, I’m so, so sorry I ever said that! I never meant any of those dreadful words I said to you, I thought you knew that by now! I've never thought of you as _just a demon!_ For Heaven’s sake, you’re my best friend, too!”

“ _Then why won’t you trust me?!”_ Crowley all but wails, hands flying up to grip Aziraphale’s shoulders and give him a wild shake.

Aziraphale’s heart aches and burns and quakes. The whole world around him seems eerie, ethereal in this odd moment, the noises of the busy London street behind the doors of the shop faraway and distant. Everything shrinks down to just the two of them, here and now, and in the dim light of the shop Crowley looks especially fragile and raw.

“Crowley,” he says, quiet and gentle, as if talking to a wild scared animal. “Of course, I trust you, you _must_ know that!”

“Then tell me! Tell me what’s been happening with you!”

“I CAN’T!” Aziraphale bellows, wincing as the words cause him actual physical pain. The monster is growling in his ear, so loud he can barely hear his own thoughts. “ _I can’t,_ Crowley, I’m sorry, but I can’t! This doesn’t mean I don’t trust you, because I do - I trust you with my life!”

“Well too bad, then, since your life means _fuck-all_ to you, you celestial bastard!” Crowley screams, face twisted, and then turns around and exits the store.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale calls after him, desperately, on his feet and ready to chase after the man, but his body won’t cooperate. His hands are shaking violently, and he sits down on them, keeps them in place.

 _Crowley wouldn’t understand,_ he keeps telling himself desperately, over and over again, until the words start to lose all meaning. He has to think it, though, has to convince himself, as the flimsy walls of his certainty start to give. _Crowley wouldn’t get it._

It seems that he won’t ever have the chance to find out for sure now.

 

***

1945.

It goes like this:

The Second World War is still not over, and Aziraphale is helping with the leftovers.

The world around him is eerie and twisted and hollow, and for the time ever, he remembers the words Crowley said to him more than a century ago: _someday you’ll take off your pink glasses and you’ll really see._

Aziraphale is old – he is positively ancient – and he’s seen it all now.

The monster is there with him, every second of every day, the only reality check Aziraphale needs these days in this surreal twisted parody of a world around him. It’s a cornerstone Aziraphale keeps coming back to when everything else gives, and even the sun and the moon and the rain have lost all of their significance.

He wonders how much more fighting the humans can bear, how much more of this can they suffer through and still come out the other end intact. He, personally, has lost all fight long ago now, and he keeps observing the people with distant, almost scientific interest, as one would watch laboratory mice during an experiment.

Sometimes, though, he still can’t help getting involved. He is an Angel, after all.

There’s a boy, no more than fourteen or fifteen, running through the narrow London alley, when a man chasing him finally catches up. The boy crumbles to the ground as a sack of potatoes, as he is shot in the back.

 _You filthy little shit,_ the man says as he comes up to the small thin body on the cobbled floor, pats the pockets of the boy’s jacket, his trousers. Aziraphale watches him, pained. None of them can see him, as he spends most of the days (months, years) now being invisible to human beings. Desperate times, desperate measures.

Finally, the man withdraws his hand, a thick wallet clutched in his long fingers. He wipes the filth off of it – the boy is, indeed, muddy and dirty, and looks like he hasn’t seen a bath in months – and puts it his own pocket.

 _That’s what you get for being a dirty fucking thief,_ he spits out, then turns around to check if anyone’s seen them in the dark twisted alley. No one has, it seems, but Aziraphale. Not that he counts.

The monster roars and roars, and the spit flies out of its huge mouth. _Easy,_ Aziraphale thinks at him, and the monster shuts its mud with a loud _clack._

The man turns and leaves, the body of the boy lying on the ground like a discarded rumble of old broken clothes, a pool of crimson blood spreading around his chest, around his head in a twisted Halo.

Aziraphale sighs, closes his weary burning eyes. Waits, till the man disappears around the corner, then crouches down on the ground next to the boy. He’s still alive, barely so, but it’s enough for Aziraphale. He raises his hands, ready to miracle it all away, and then –

“That’s enough, Aziraphale, thank you.”

He startles, momentarily disoriented and panicked at having been seen, but then his exhausted brain catches up, and he recognizes the voice.

He looks up, his stomach sinking.

“Gabriel,” he says, barely an acknowledgement. He doesn’t have the energy left for niceties and big fake smiles. The air around them is stuffed and stale and smoky from all the destruction, and really, Aziraphale can only take so much. He cuts straight to the point. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been tasked to let you know you are under suspension,” Gabriel informs him with the fakest smiles Aziraphale has ever laid his eyes on. He is continuously aware of a child still bleeding out right under his nose, while Gabriel is bothering him for whatever stupid reason it is. Aziraphale can’t bring himself to care, impatient, as annoyance and anger rapidly bubble up to the surface.

“ _What_? What do you mean, _suspension?”_

“Your Miracle privileges, old friend,” Gabriel says, and Aziraphale will be damned if he ever called Crowley that in a tone Gabriel uses just now – as if it’s some kind a clever subtle insult. “They have been revoked.”

 _Easy_ , he commands again, as the monster prowls forward, ready to sink its teeth into Gabriel, ready to bite and tear and hurt. It’s much harder to keep control of him, this time around, and Aziraphale feels the force of the effort shaking up his entire body, washing him up like waves of electricity, and the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand with the strain of it.

“Why?” Aziraphale croaks out, eyes shutting. He can’t deal with this right now, especially when there’s a teenager bleeding out and dying right in front of him and the monster getting harder and harder to tame by the second. He needs Gabriel to go away, now, right this second before Aziraphale loses it altogether.

“Too many unsanctioned Miracles, I’m afraid, the higher-ups are not so happy about that,” Gabriel says cheerily, as if there’s isn’t a dying child before his eyes. “And let me tell you, I see where they come from! Take this here, for example,” He nods at the bleeding boy on the ground, acknowledging him for the first time. “He has committed thievery right now, why are you Miracling him?”

“ _He is a child, dying,”_ Aziraphale says, slowly, incredulously. He can’t quite understand what’s going on here, why he is made to stop, why he is made to explain himself for such an basic act of kindness and general _decency._

“Mmm, that doesn’t make him any less of a thief, doesn’t it?” Gabriel says courteously, with a wide grin on his face, expression overly chirp as if he is speaking to a dimwit. “See now, Aziraphale, you ought to have made an official inquiry before you decided to, ah, take the initiative. You don’t want to just throw your Miracles around like that! That would rather stop making them _Miracles_ , don’t you agree?”

Aziraphale stares at him. Gabriel’s voice seems to be coming to him as if from underwater, muffled and unclear, or maybe he’s the one underwater – he can’t quite tell anymore. His hands are shaking violently, heart beating fast and loud in his ears. The monster paces around him in restless circles.

 _Step away from the human, Aziraphale_ , he hears through the haze, as his vision blurs. He blinks fast, trying to shake the feeling off, but the monster is growing in size now – and it’s vicious and wrathful and bigger than life. It howls – a chilling deadly sound, painful to his ears, as if Satan himself has given out a scream of agony, and the ground is shaking and the world is spinning around him, and Aziraphale just can’t keep it down anymore, he can’t, _he can’t –_

He lets go.

There’s a moment – a minute, an hour, an eternity – in which everything is dark and silent. A type of Limbo Aziraphale welcomes and lets himself drown in – the silence and darkness easy on his tired broken body. He floats in it, drowns in it, lets himself be swallowed by it, eerie and calm and ethereal, but nothing good ever lasts, doesn’t it, and he is violently pulled back to reality – and the reality is not pretty and it’s not easy.

He coughs out the dirt and dust, squints through the thick smoke around him. He’s lying amongst tons and tons of stone and broken timber, a mess of chaos and destruction around him, like a bomb has just dropped right on his head.

Frantically, he searches for the bleeding boy. Miraculously, he finds the small torn body quickly enough, amongst the acres and acres of debris.

The boy is dead.

None of his most daring miracles could ever fix  _that_.

Mechanically and not-at-all there, Aziraphale searches for Gabriel. He is nowhere to find. Aziraphale surveys the damage instead.

It turns out, several buildings around them exploded to dust.

 _Must have been another bombing_ , a tearful lady walking by tells him, horrified, as she looks onto what used to be ancient London buildings and is now a mess of broken dusty blocks of stone and cement, instead. Belatedly, Aziraphale realizes she is talking to him, so he must be no longer hidden. There are dusty tear-tracks running down the lady’s cheeks as she mourns the old London street.

 _I suppose we should thank God they were evacuated_ , she says.

Thank God, indeed.

The street is otherwise empty, clouds of smoke slowly coming up in grey circles. Distantly, Aziraphale wonders if he’s awake.

Because if he is, he’s just _killed_ a person.

 _Please, please, God, please_ , he thinks desperately, horribly, incoherently, as he prays for who knows what, too hazed out and frantic to even form a coherent thought. Let it be a bombing, please, let it be an explosion, a dinner cooking gone wrong – anything, anything at all but Aziraphale just losing bloody control over his own _thing,_ his own _defect, please_

It’s not a bombing, and it’s not an explosion. He finds that out later, when Gabriel shows up again to reprimand him and let him know he’d been put under suspension indefinitely. Gabriel doesn’t seem much bothered with the event, though, and _the boy would’ve died anyway_ , he says as an afterthought.

Aziraphale can only listen to so much of it. He tunes out half-way through the speech, Gabriel a nagging annoying presence in the back of his vision, and he can’t quite hear anything over a mantra inside his own mind:

_I’ve killed a person, I’ve killed a person, I’ve killed_

***

2011.

“I’m never giving him this thing, it’s going to make him an idiot, mark my words,” Crowley says, squinting at his new smartphone in his hand, while simultaneously tickling the toddler with his other one. He scrolls through something on the small device, then sighs and presses a button, which makes the screen go black. “Look at all that progress. I wonder when the humanity is going to realize it’s making them dumber by the year.”

“What is it, even?” Aziraphale wonders, as he takes over on the tickling. Warlock bursts into laughter, a ringing happy sound that makes Aziraphale’s heart go warm. He looks back up at Crowley in his ridiculous nanny outfit.

“It’s the new iPhone, angel, really, how on earth did you miss that? Half of London bent over backwards trying to get this thing when it first came out,” Crowley explains, rolling his eyes.

“Forgive me, if I haven’t been the most up-to-date with the electronics coming out,” Aziraphale huffs out. It stings a bit, when it’s made known that he lacks knowledge on something. Aziraphale likes to pride himself on being especially knowledgeable – he’s not _Crowley_ , for God’s sake. “I’ve been a little busy raising the Antichrist and preventing the world from ending, you know.”

“So have I!” Crowley says good-naturedly, or maybe it’s just the old-lady outfit that makes him look softer. “But you don’t see me using that as an excuse to slack off and let myself go.”

Aziraphale chuckles despite trying not to. Crowley just has it him, this something that makes Aziraphale go soft around the edges, like a milk-soaked biscuit. “What do you do with it, anyway?”

“There’s loads to do with it, angel, you should really go out and get yourself one,” Crowley says and then admonishes him: “Your old piece of junk has long since lived its days. Try getting yourself a phone that’s been made in _this millennium_ , at least.”

“Why would I need a new one?” Aziraphale wonders, honestly beyond comprehending. “It works when I want to talk to you, what else would I need it for?”

Something in Crowley’s face shifts, melts and rearranges. He looks at Aziraphale with too much emotion for him to try and decipher. There’s a tiny sad smile tugging on his lips.

“What else, indeed,” he murmurs quietly, his voice too soft and warm, too tender for Aziraphale to even begin to comprehend.

“Really, though, what would you do with a device like that?” Aziraphale asks again, then turns to wipe saliva and snot away from Warlock’s face. The toddler sneezes, and there’s a whole lot of new snot running down his chin. Aziraphale sighs, and wipes at it again.

“What, besides looking at videos of funny cats, you mean? Well, for one, there’s such a thing as social media,” Crowley says, as he puts on the apron and moves to open the fridge, his movements so graceful and organic he might as well have been a dedicated housewife. Aziraphale smiles at the thought. “It’s for, you know, being social, meeting people, getting you ego stroked – that kind of thing.”

“Is your ego not stroked enough in real life?” Aziraphale grins, feeling a surge of affection swell up in him, so intense, he has to shake his head to clear it.

“What?!” Crowley bellows exaggeratedly, closing the fridge with cucumbers and a couple of carrots in his hands. He points one carrot at Aziraphale accusingly. “All you ever do is insult me!”

“It’s not my fault you do the most ridiculous things—” Aziraphale starts, and Crowley lifts and eyebrow at him pointedly. “Alright, point taken.”

Crowley gets a kitchen knife out, starts to cut the cucumbers in little pieces.

“Basically, you create an image of who you wanted to be and never got to and sell it on the Internet. Get to meet new people sometimes. Sometimes just use it for sex.”

He says it so casually, Aziraphale almost pays no attention to it, but then he backtracks on the sentence and almost chokes on air. Warlock’s tiny hand smacks him in the ribs, and he snaps of his initial shock.

“ _For sex?_ ” he repeats, as if he’s never heard of such thing before.

Crowley turns around, outstretches his hand to him. There’s a carrot, peeled and clean, in his hand, as he offers it up to Aziraphale.

At Aziraphale’s prolonged dumbfounded silence, he sighs, places the carrot on the kitchen table instead.

“Do you--?” Aziraphale lets out, his voice resembling a crackling of rusty metal. He clears his constricted throat, tries again. “Do _you_ ever use it for sex?”

“What do you think?” Crowley says incredulously, folds his long thin arms at his chest. His answer is neither here nor there, though, and Aziraphale wonders anxiously if he should push it further.

The idea of Crowley having sex is _atrocious._

That’s a lie, though. The idea of Crowley having sex _with anyone else_ is atrocious.

Aziraphale backtracks on this last thought, face going hot and flushed the very same second.

“Anyway,” Crowley drawls, expression closed off and detached. “You can also do all sorts of things, I mean – the internet alone, you would actually love it! There’s a thing called _Wikipedia…_ ”

But Aziraphale only half-listens to his rambling, tuning out Crowley’s voice with ease, that’s come with centuries of practice. He feels like something has shifted between them, just now, or maybe it’s just his overly-stimulated brain going into a frenzy over a thought of Crowley being naked, being open, intimate with someone that’s not Aziraphale.

There’s a thunder outside, and with a startle, he realizes he hasn’t even noticed it’s been raining heavily, the raindrops pounding on the windows and the rooftop like an orchestra of tiny drums. It sobers him up a bit, as, with a cold detachment, he realizes he has no right to Crowley, no right to demand and expect anything from him at all. If there ever was a chance – if there was a million of them over the thousands of years – Aziraphale has blown them all, has done it all by himself, and no one helped him. He brought this on _himself_ , him and his never-ending selfishness and fear and _defects_ , and now just bloody look at him.

“What do you think?”

Aziraphale blinks, focuses on Crowley, who’s showing him a bowl of neatly made salad.

“That alright?” Crowley asks him again, eyebrows going high over the glasses.

“Yes, yes,” Aziraphale mutters, and tries to not think about anything other than the salad. “It’s perfectly alright, my friend.”

***

1950.

The war ends, and there are celebrations everywhere in the world. Aziraphale sleeps right through it.

He feels like a hypocrite at first – after all, wasn’t he always the one to berate Crowley for _partaking in such a luxury_ _while people are suffering all the time?_

But then, as the waking days bring him nothing more than earth-shattering misery and grief, he welcomes the silent darkness that comes with falling asleep. He never dreams.

He mourns at first. He is a being made of unearthly love, love that’s bigger than life itself, and of course, every war in the human history has left its mark on him, has cut a piece of him, has poked a hole in his soul. This one, it feels to him, has left a distinct angel-shaped hole in the universe, where Aziraphale used to be.

He mourns the dead, and he mourns the living – dead in everything but a formality, anyway, and he just can't comprehend the humanity’s continuous attempt to function normally at the wake of such cosmic tragedy, like a chicken continuing to run around after its head has been cut off. The world ended, didn’t it? At least for Aziraphale, it did.

He sleeps through the 1946 and then right up through 1947 and 1948 as well. The times he is awake, far and rare in between, are agonizing. The world has spun and spun and spun, and now it’s stilled, tilted off its axis, and Aziraphale isn’t sure which way is up and down anymore. Everything is alien and hostile and strange. The only familiar thing left is pain and grief – the only reliable constants in his life.

God used to be the other one.

Funny, isn’t it, how Aziraphale has devoted all of his life to God, devoted all of his very being, his essence – everything he’s ever done and sacrificed was for Her, and then –

Turns out God is a bit of an arse.

It sounds like a bad joke, like a tasteless anecdote, and so Aziraphale tries to not think about it. He fails, of course. It’s like an itch he doesn’t want to address, doesn’t want to touch and scratch, but it’s always there – itching and itching and itching.

Aziraphale never did have an itch he couldn’t scratch. Never let a niggling thought stay in the back of his mind, always pulled them to forefront, examining it in the light of day. He never did leave well enough alone.

So he sleeps. It’s not like he can torture himself into thinking while he’s at it, and so he does it more and more every day. It’s not hard, falling asleep. He’s just exhausted enough, anyway. The sleep comes easy, and Aziraphale lets himself dissolve into it, as the moments in between become more unbearable, more violently painful.

This pain is barely survivable.

He sleeps.

It’s 1949 when he opens his dreary eyes. The world is a colorless distant noise in the back of his tortured mind, and he just lets it be. He will have to face the world again sometime, but today is not going to be that day.

There’s a loud annoying sound coming up from the bathroom. Aziraphale squeezes his eyes shut, ignores the irritating sound – like water slowly tapping away in the sink. Breathes slowly in and out, wills himself back to sleep.

It’s 1950 the time he wakes next, and he knows that because it’s Christmas time, and he can hear children singing Carrols outside the window. There’s a loud noise coming out of the bathroom still. Aziraphale gets up, moves his uncoordinating body to go investigate.

The faucet seems to be leaking. There are lone heavy droplets of water falling in the sink with an earth-shattering noise, that might as well be sandpaper rasping over his very eardrums. Aziraphale winces, rubs his watery eyes, scratches the bridge of his nose. He has no idea how to go about fixing that.

He could just miracle it away, he realizes with painful bitterness.

Gabriel came back somewhere in 1947, or at least Aziraphale thinks it must have been couple of years ago.

 _Your suspension has been lifted,_ he said with a wide plastic smile, tapping Aziraphale on the shoulder. He said a lot of other things, but Aziraphale was not listening at this point.

He has to fix the goddamn faucet. He’ll be damned if he has to miracle it away.

He goes to sleep instead.

When he wakes up, it’s hot and stuffy in the room. He glances outside the window, disinterested – it’s summertime. He has no idea what year it is. It doesn’t matter. He can go anywhere, do anything, but he can’t hide away from this, cannot wait or sleep it though and then expect to be fixed at some point.

Wherever he goes, there he is.

Wherever he is, he’s still a murderer. Whatever he does, that simple fact remains undisputable: he has killed a child.

The faucet is still leaking in the bathroom. Aziraphale groans and gets up.

It’s dark by the time he’s exhausted himself, trying to fix the tap. The water keeps falling, each drop sharp, like a bullet fired in a dark narrow alley. He has to fix it, needs to fix this now.

The water keeps dropping, sound growing louder like a knocking, almost.

“Aziraphale, are you there?” He hears then. A knocking on the door downstairs.

Crowley.

Slowly, each movement causing him ache and vague discomfort, Aziraphale gets down the stairs, walks through the store he hasn’t bothered to check up on in years – dark and dusty and miserable – and opens the front door.

Crowley is standing there, looking pained.

“Hi,” he breathes out in a wet swoop of air, hot against Aziraphale’s cheek. Silently, he opens the door wider, steps aside, lets Crowley brush past him on his way in.

Even from here, amongst the piles and columns of books all around him, he can hear the water tapping away in the bathroom. He has to bloody fix it.

“How are you?” Crowley says awkwardly, shifting from one foot to another. Aziraphale starts; he's almost forgotten he was there.

The question sounds hollow and silly, and it hangs in the air like a heavy stormy cloud above them. Aziraphale can’t bring himself to reply. It’s been years since he’s seen Crowley. Years, in which he came up with hundreds of ways and thousands of words to fix the monstrous thing he said that last time; years, in which he practiced saying them, despite his very best efforts not to.

Now, with Crowley tall and thin and sad in front of him, he finds there’s nothing he can say to him.

The air around him is tight and stifling. He turns and makes his way back upstairs.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley calls out after him, low and desperate, voice breaking out by the end of his name. Aziraphale doesn’t stop, hears footsteps following down after him.

“ _Aziraphale_ ,” Crowley says again urgently, catching up to him, and his hand flies up to grab on Aziraphale’s elbow. Crowley is staring at him as if he’s never seen him before. “ _Jesus,_ ” he whispers, barely a whisper. “What’s happened to you?”

Nothing. Everything. Just a child who got killed. A God who is a twat. Angels who are jerks. A couple of buildings that exploded in the heart of London.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley snaps, louder this time, and he gives Aziraphale’s elbow a shake. There’s infinite worry on his face, in his eyes, even though he’s wearing sunglasses.

A water droplet falls in the sink with a sickening noise.

“I have to—” Aziraphale rasps out, voice a tiny scary thing, hoarse with disuse. “I have to fix the tap.”

“Fix the— _what_?” Crowley says, voice rising in volume as his brows furrow even further. He looks positively scared. “Aziraphale, _please_ , what’s going on with you?”

There’s a note of raw helpless desperation as he asks the question. Aziraphale cannot even begin to think of an answer to it.

“The faucet is leaking water,” he explains instead, the only thing he knows with certainty anymore – it’s that the faucet is broken. “I need to fix the faucet.”

Crowley stares at him for what feels like several lifetimes. He takes his glasses of, his yellow eyes going up and down Aziraphale’s body.

“What are you even talking about?!” he demands in a watery voice, as if saying the words causes him physical pain. Aziraphale can sympathize with that. “Forget the bloody faucet, Aziraphale! When was the last time you  _ate_  anything?! Jesus, _look at yourself_!!”

He yells out the last part. Aziraphale blinks, then, indeed, looks down at himself.

He gets what Crowley is on about, then. He does notice his body has lost its softness, some of the pudginess that used to concentrate at the area of his stomach. It’s flat now, and the sweater hanging off his frame like it’s several sizes too big, can only add to the impression.

He shrugs. It’s not as if things like that matter anymore.

“Say something!” Crowley implores, almost begs, eyes huge and wet and desperate. His hands are jerking slightly where they grip Aziraphale’s shoulders. He looks like a wild animal, thin and ruffled and scared within an inch of its life. “ _Why are you being like this_?”

“It’s the tap, I need to—”

Crowley growls, actually throws his head back and lets out a helpless growl. Aziraphale blinks at him, the sound cacophonous in his ears.

“Just miracle it away then!”

“ _No_!” Aziraphale shrieks, fury and anger rising up like bile in his mouth. Crowley shuts up, stares at him incredulously. “No,” he says again, forcing his voice down, backing off.

Silence falls between them, ringing and ironically loud. Somewhere down the line of their unmoving bodies and distant sound of water hitting the sink, Crowley’s face breaks and crumbles into pieces.

“ _I’m sorry,_ ” he croaks out, his eyes falling shut. “I’m so sorry for what I said back then, Aziraphale, you’ve no idea—I didn’t mean—”

His voice breaks down and fades away. He stands there, looking lost and vulnerable, like a toddler cried out and exhausted after a tantrum.

“ _I’m sorry_ ,” again, barely a whisper.

Aziraphale feels something hot and wet running down his face. Panicked, he thinks for a moment that the tap water must have broken through the ceiling and leaking on his face now, and then, belatedly, he realises he is crying.

“ _Crowley_ ,” he manages to rasp out as his lungs close up and he is choking. “ _I’m sorry”_

And then Crowley’s hands are on his face, on his sides, on the back of his neck – everywhere a pair of hands could touch another body, and Aziraphale is crying and crying and crying.

 _Look at you_ , Crowley whispers frantically in his ear, as his hands squeeze the pain and grief out of Aziraphale's shell of a body, _look what you’ve done to yourself_

Aziraphale’s whole body shakes and trembles as he sobs and coughs, until he feels he’s going to cough his heart out. Crowley’s arms are tight as vice around him.

 _I’m sorry, Aziraphale, please, please,_ Crowley hisses or cries or screams, not that that he can tell anymore.

 _Please, forgive me_ , Crowley whispers. And: _let me help you, please, please_

And so Aziraphale does. Crowley ends up helping him with a whole lot more than a broken faucet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews help prevent the Apocalypse!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might have noticed that the overall amount of chapters has changed - yet again - to a higher number... I promise that was the last time I did it!! It's just that it would've been a monstrosity of a chapter, if I left it at that, and it just didn't feel right... So, there's gonna be one more - JUST ONE MORE - part of this, and then we're all done, I promise. Even I can only take so much angst (let alone produce it)...
> 
> Also, please note there's mention of drug use in this chapter - nothing graphic, though. Be warned!
> 
> Enjoy!

1977.

The first time it happens, Aziraphale pays no mind to it, naturally: Crowley is a demon and is a wicked one at that. Of course, he is going to consume ridiculous amounts of alcohol from time to time and drink himself into oblivion. Besides, Aziraphale is the last person to point fingers and throw stones – he’s not that much of a hypocrite, at the very least. So he just pats Crowley’s fiery long hair, brushes his fingers over Crowley’s unconscious face – guilty and panicked, afraid he is going to be caught in the act – and then gets Crowley into his flat. And there’s that.

The second time it happens (to Aziraphale’s knowledge, at least), it’s almost two months later, and Aziraphale hasn’t seen Crowley since he had to drag his passed-out body onto the bed. This time, Crowley is loud and brash and obnoxious, behavior provocative and arrogant as he slides around the tables and booths of the pub. His body is taught, though, like a guitar string ready to tear and burst any moment, and there are waves of almost tangible pain and sorrow coming off him.

“Perhaps it’s time to go home now,” Aziraphale says softly, concerned, and touches Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley flinches as if he’s been burned.

“Perhaps it’s time you chilled and let me have some fucking fun!” Crowley snaps and almost runs across the pub, smoothly chatting up with some girl, who’s been eyeballing him all night.

Later, when the pub is closing down, and Crowley is struggling to keep himself upright, Aziraphale suggests that they should leave again, firmer this time.

“Oh just bugger off, will ya?” Crowley snipes, grimacing. “Nothing’s holding you here, just leave, if it’s too much of a hardship for you!”

The passive-aggressive tone, in which he says it, doesn’t go unnoticed. Aziraphale sighs, weighing up the options of staying here with a sour, moody Crowley versus going home and finishing the new volume he’s just been delivered this afternoon.

“My dear friend, you seem to be rather upset this evening,” he says gently. “Have I done something wrong?”

Crowley spares him a look of such vehement hatred that it knocks all thoughts about the new volume out of Aziraphale’s mind.

“Christ, no,” Crowley slurs, bites on his lip hard enough to draw blood. “We all know the Almighty Angel is too pure to ever do anything fucking wrong.”

The music is still playing in the background as the bartender wipes the tables around them. Aziraphale meets his gaze, and the bartender glances at the door and then at the watch at his wrist. Aziraphale gets the hint.

“Alright,” he says, taking a deep breath. He doesn’t much care for the tone Crowley is taking with him all of a sudden. “I think we should leave and then talk about it when we are home and sobered up.”

“I’m not fucking sobering up,” Crowley spits outs, eyes flashing. “And I’m not going fucking home, either.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, frowning and clenching his teeth. He’s getting increasingly agitated by the second. “How about you tell me what’s going on with you?”

Crowley throws his head back and laughs, the sound foreign and ugly and wrong.

“Oh, what, just like _you’re_ telling me what’s wrong?” His voice cracks with emotion. He wipes the back of his hand almost angrily across his mouth and nose. “Like you _ever told me_ what’s wrong? You’re a fucking hypocrite, Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale swallows past the bile in his suddenly dry mouth. The monster has not awoken yet, but it is a matter of seconds if it does. He studies the demon across the table.

Once again, he wonders what’s stopping him from telling Crowley, what on earth is holding him back. The answer is there, somewhere at the back of his mind, slipping away just as he tries to grasp it. He’s too tired.

The two of them have allegedly been friends for about six thousand years by now – or least for a couple thousand of those – but they’ve really just been one another’s port in a never-ending storm of despair, tragedy, and madness. And _that’s_ the foundation of their relationship – not a genuine feeling of companionship and friendship.

_Crowley wouldn’t understand._

“Am I boring you, Angel?” Crowley says after Aziraphale’s prolonged silence, spitting out the last word as if it was an insult. “By all means, don’t let me hold you – just go fucking away, then!”

It’s an amount of swearing in only such a short period of time Aziraphale hasn’t heard in decades, and making concessions can only go so far. He is exhausted and more than a little hurt, and if Crowley is going to be that way, he might as well do so without Aziraphale taking the role of a punchbag. He stands up, the chair creaking loudly underneath him.

“Perhaps I shall,” he says coldly. He grabs his coat from a hanger nearby, puts it on. Distantly he contemplates just how much Crowley has had to drink this evening; the amount of liquor seems almost impossible – even for a celestial being – as he sums all the drink up in his head. He wonders how Crowley can even form sentences at this point.

“Splendid!” Crowley snaps and pushes his sunglasses further up his nose, as if that would more signify his point. “Off you bloody go!”

Aziraphale spares one last look at him, before he turns and leaves the almost empty pub. He wishes luck to the poor bartender, who is now up to the task of getting Crowley to leave the premises all by himself.

The air outside is cool and crispy and strangely sobering, considering he hasn’t had much to drink all night. He takes a deep breath, fills his lungs with the biting-cold night air, and heads home. And if there’s a niggling sense of guilt and shame and worry pulling at his heart as he walks, he ignores it.

***

 

2001.

The baby’s wailing has been going on for long enough, when Crowley finally snaps:

“Promise to discorporate me, if I ever have to deal with that again,” he grumbles, nudging Aziraphale with his elbow. The woman holding the baby gives him a heated look from across the bus – Crowley made no effort to lower his voice.

“It’s just bad luck,” Aziraphale comments with generous sympathy. “First the one on the plane—”

“Arrgh, don’t remind me,” Crowley shakes his head and purses his lips. “And anyway, didn’t you sleep through the entire flight, leaving me alone to deal with the tiny screaming human next to me? How could you even fall asleep to that?”

“I didn’t sleep the whole time,” Aziraphale points out. The baby across the bus takes on an even louder note, and they both wince. “I woke up when they gave us food, remember?”

“Ah, of course, how I could I forget the cosmic angelic love you only express towards various food items,” Crowley says with unbearable fondness. “None of us could ever compete.”

His tone is light and joking when he says it, but Aziraphale can hear the underlying sadness, anyway. Unable to come up with anything to say to that, he turns back to the window, watches the lively New York streets as the bus drives them by. It’s already autumn, but the mother nature seems to have missed the memo, and the heat and humidity in the air feel too much like the middle of July for Aziraphale’s tastes. Still, he hasn’t visited the city in more than a few decades, and he is amazed at how unrecognizable it looks now, fascinated with the little shops and cafés and pizzerias popping up, vibrant and colourful on every street.

“We should go to the Central Park,” he suddenly says, without looking at Crowley. The bus has stopped at the red light, and Aziraphale is studying a large bookstore through the dusty bus window. It looks nothing like his own ancient store in the heart of London, and the thought makes him oddly homesick.

“What, and sit on the bench?” Crowley says next to him, and Aziraphale hears his smile, without looking at his face. The bus starts moving again, and Aziraphale’s shoulder hits Crowley’s warm one at the sudden turn. “Isn’t that a bit too—”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence. There’s an earth-shattering crack somewhere in the distance, and the bus creaks and rattles and spins. Aziraphale and Crowley and all the people around them go flying with the force of gravity, as the vehicle turns upside down and then sideways. There’s a sound of glass breaking, of people screaming, of metal creaking and folding with the force of impact.

Aziraphale opens his eyes.

Everything hurts. It takes him a while to realize that what he initially thought to be ringing in his ears, is, in fact, the non-stop sound of chaos around him – people screaming and sobbing and running around, cars honking, baby crying.

He looks sharply in the direction of the baby. He can’t see anything clearly through the thick dust and smoke that surround him. For a long torturous moment, he is thrown back to that day in London – more than half a decade ago – and the way it all looked the same as now, the dust, the smoke, the destruction.

Then something crushes painfully into him, and the eerie surreal feeling is knocked out of him at once.

He is lying on the ground, he realizes. Slowly, every inch of his body on fire, he makes himself stand. Only to immediately be knocked back down on the ground by somebody, as they rush past him.

He gets up again, backs into the first vertical surface he finds lest he gets knocked down again. It is complete chaos around him – people running around like mad, crying, screaming, sobbing, lying down in the ground, whimpering, asking for help.

A feeling of unreality comes over him just then, a sudden awareness of being trapped in a bad dream, a panicky sense of wild despair and helplessness, as if he possessed no will of his own.

“Crowley,” he lets out, voice immediately drowned out in the cacophony of sounds around him. He coughs the smoke out of his lungs, tries again. “Crowley!”

No one replies. He might as well have been invisible for all the notice he gets.

He searches for the bus they sat in not five minutes ago. It’s there on the pedestrian road, turned on its side, all windows gone, glass and debris surrounding it, making it look as inaccessible as mountain Everest. Aziraphale starts towards it, mind set on finding Crowley, and nothing at all matters to him at this moment. He has to find Crowley. He needs to find Crowley, now, before he can even start to comprehend what’s going on.

It’s barely a fifty-meter distance to the bus, yet it feels like triathlon – step over a body here, avoid a block of cement there, get knocked on the ground over and over again.

The baby is crying somewhere near the bus, and distantly, Aziraphale wonders what happened to its mother. She was just there, shooting Crowley a dirty look from across the bus. She was _just there._

Dread squeezes his heart in a cold sticky grip. He needs to find Crowley.

A lifetime and an eternity later, he reaches the bus, walks around it in small tentative steps. Crowley is nowhere to be found.

Then the ground is quaking again, and, trying to ignore the lump of panic and dread that suddenly materializes in his gut, Aziraphale sees a crowd of people running towards him, stepping all over the bodies on the ground – a hysterical unstoppable force of nature. He takes an unconscious step back, presses himself against the side of the broken bus.

“AZIRAPHALE!”

He spins around, and there he is – tall skinny figure, swaying on shaky legs on the side of the ruined street.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale lets out, the force of the relief making his legs turn into jelly. He feels wetness in his eyes, pays it no mind. He must get to Crowley.

Then several things happen at once.

One of the sprinting people bumps into him hard, sending Aziraphale flying to the ground yet again. A baby, whom Aziraphale can now see from his position on the ground – a tiny body lying amongst the dust and dirt and unmoving buddies – starts on another fit of wailing. It’s lying right in the path of people running towards something at the end of the street, blind and deaf in the wake of mass hysteria that seems to have swallowed the city.

He sees Crowley see the baby.

Then, before Aziraphale can as much move, Crowley is there, lying on the ground as well, his body covering the baby up, tiny human hidden under Crowley’s chest, between his elbows.

The crowd is moving past them like a herd of wild bisons. The heavy stomping of their feet is life sandpaper against Aziraphale’s ears, the dust rising from the ground making his eyes water and tear up.

Yet, he dares not to look away.

A man steps onto Crowley’s back as if it was a trampoline; then a woman does, her foot going right down Crowley’s spine. Aziraphale thinks he hears a distinct crack, but he might be imagining things – he wouldn’t be able to hear anything if he tried.

He watches more and more people step over Crowley, step onto his back, like he’s nothing more than a literal stepping stone, watches Crowley’s arms shake and tremble with the force of it, the strain of keeping himself up above the baby, making his whole body shake.

Frozen in place, Aziraphale watches this for what feels like a hellish eternity.

Then, just like that, the crowd passes, moving on, and Crowley’s broken body crumbles to the ground next to the baby.

Aziraphale’s limbs work again. He doesn’t remember crossing the distance between them, but then Crowley’s body is in his arms, his hands going over Crowley’s muddy face, running through Crowley’s dirty dusty hair.

 _Crowley,_ he says again and again, until he doesn’t think he can remember any other word. _Crowley, God, Crowley_

The noise around him has blurred into a meaningless drone, a sluggish river of muffed screams and sobs and shrieks. He feels jittery and almost loses his focus, becoming intensely and unhelpfully conscious of his physical self—twitchy legs, dry mouth, trembling aching organs.

Crowley stirs and whimpers, eyes screwed painfully shut, and Aziraphale remembers he is actually an angel. He makes extra sure to be gentle, as he runs his hands over the demon’s body – one bone healed one miracle at a time.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley croaks out it, opening his eyes. “The baby—”

“Yes, yes, the baby, yes,” he says, only now remembering its existence. It’s settled by now, apparently realizing the fruitlessness of its continued cries for attention. Aziraphale scoops it in his arms, sways it around mechanically. Crowley watches them with a worried expression, then lets his head drop back on the ground.

“ _Hell_ , did that hurt,” he admits, exhaling a wet breath, and Aziraphale can’t help it anymore. He sets the baby down between them, then scoops Crowley in his arms so tight, he might as well break the bones he’s just mended. Crowley is soft and pliant in his arms, then his hands come up and tighten over Aziraphale’s back.

“It’s okay,” he says quietly, his breathing erratic. “ _It’s okay_.”

“I thought –” Aziraphale says, tries to say, as his voice breaks and disappears. He can’t express it, can’t even begin to try to put into words this feeling – this cosmic tragedy of an idea of losing Crowley.

“I know, I know,” Crowley is saying, softly. “Me too.”

“ _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale says feverishly, a single thought taking up all the space in his mind. “What you did—don’t—” he struggles to say it, say it the way he means it. He cares about people, and he cares about that baby, but _Crowley_ : “You are not _expandable_.”

“Angel,” Crowley says simply, like a prayer.

There is an almost unbearable tension in the air, a mood of anxious waiting, though none of them seems to know whether they are waiting for a logical explanation for whatever the hell has happened or a second wave of explosions and mass hysteria. It’s as if the whole world has paused to take a deep breath and steel itself for whatever is going to happen next.

Distantly, he hears another wave of crushing footsteps. He lets go of Crowley, takes the baby in his arms again. Another crowd is rushing towards them like a natural disaster. They have ten, maybe fifteen seconds, before it almost kills them again.

“ _Aziraph_ —" Crowley starts urgently, and then.

The monster roars and howls, rearing up in all its humongous glory, and people are thrown around in the air, like an invisible explosion has sent them flying. The beast roars and growls and wails, ready to hurt them and break them, tear them apart for ever coming _near_ Crowley—

“We need to get out of here,” Crowley says, dazed, looking up at him with confused eyes. There’s dried blood, dark and almost brown, on his forehead, pieces of dirt and rubble in his hair, bits of dust stuck between his eyelashes.

Aziraphale loves him _impossibly._

“Yes,” he says through the haze of asphyxiating tenderness. “Let’s get out of here.”

***

 

1967

“Well, um, can I drop you anywhere?” Crowley asks him earnestly from the driver’s seat of his Bentley.

“No, thank you,” he says, and notes the way Crowley’s face falls. “Oh, don’t look so disappointed,” he adds, his own sorrow like a tight ball in his throat. The beast scratches at his insides and lets out a desperate wail. “Perhaps one day we could… dine at the Ritz.” He finishes with a sad smile, the thought of them dining together at Ritz – a distant faraway fairy-tale, that passes quickly, like a shameful sexual fantasy.

“I’ll give you a lift,” Crowley tries again, desperate. They both know he is not talking about literal driving anymore. “Anywhere you want to go.”

A rush of tenderness surges up in him so powerful, Aziraphale’s heart is on fire. They happen sometimes – spasms of wild longing strike him out of nowhere, leaving him dazed and weepy, prone to sullen fits of anger that inevitably get turned against Crowley himself, which is just unfair and plain senseless.

And that’s the summary of Aziraphale’s life, isn’t it – a cluttered saga of unfairness, bad decisions and emotional melodrama.

“You go too fast for me, Crowley,” he says, and what he means is _he_ is the one going too fast, _he_ is the one going in circles and zigzags and helixes, while Crowley continues to move steadily forward.

For weeks now he’s felt the strength leaving his body in a slow leak – like sand slipping out through his fingers – and it is gone. He is emotionally bankrupt.

Crowley looks away then, ashamed and dejected, face half-hidden behind the huge sunglasses and the bangs of fiery red hair.

Aziraphale’s fingers burn and shake to touch him. He makes his wayward hands go for the door instead.

Crowley is silent as he slams the door shut, the sound of it hollow and distant.

 

***

 

1978

The third time it happens, it’s much, much later, and Aziraphale almost misses it. He hasn’t seen Crowley in months – ever since the unpleasant encounter at the pub – so he swallows down his pride and picks up a phone.

Crowley doesn’t answer.

He waits it out, calls again. And then again. And again and again.

Crowley still doesn’t answer.

He goes through a long internal struggle then. He doesn’t really feel like going to Crowley’s to deal with his passive aggression or to be sniped at and insulted. Obviously, Crowley hasn’t exactly let it go, still – whatever it is, that he needs to let go of. It’s not like Crowley has bothered to inform Aziraphale what it is that he’s done to warrant such an attitude.

By all means, he should let it rest and wait for Crowley to deal with whatever this is on his own.

But there it is again – the pestering guilt and ever-growing worry, rising up to his chest and then spreading everywhere down his body. Whatever they are to each other – whatever Crowley thinks they are to each other – Aziraphale bloody _cares._ The monster gnaws its teeth in his chest in mute solidarity with the sentiment.

So he closes the store and takes a stroll to Crowley’s flat. The weather is nice and warm, anyway, and he might as well enjoy the day. By the time he reaches Crowley’s door, he almost convinces himself that everything is as grand as ever – Crowley is fine, and Aziraphale is fine, and the thing that happened between them last time – it’s also _fine_ , as well, he shouldn’t have worried.

But he should have, as it turns out. If anything, he should have worried much, much more.

Crowley is not there to answer the door, and after a while Aziraphale just lets himself in, the feeling of wrongness overpowering any sense of rudeness. The flat is dark and quiet, as he searches for Crowley.

He finds him on the floor of the bathroom.

There’s a syringe sticking out of his arm, the vein fat and purple where the needle breaks it.

Aziraphale can’t breathe, because all the oxygen must have been sucked out of the Earth. He stands there, gulping for air like a fish, eyes glued to the crook of Crowley’s elbow. Crowley’s body is limp and lifeless, sprawled half on the floor, half against the side of the toilet. His head hangs low against his chest, which doesn’t seem to be moving.

 _God, Christ, shit,_ is all that comes up to his mind at the sight. On cotton legs, he takes a few steps closer, kneels on the cold hard floor before Crowley, gently lifts his head by his chin. Crowley’s glasses are missing, and oddly, the thought feels somehow important to him. He touches Crowley’s wrist, his fingers finding pulse – weak and barely there – and only then does coherent thought return to his mind.

 _Jesus Christ, Crowley,_ he mutters, shaking his head, _what have you done now_

He miracles the drug influence away, sobers Crowley up, and waits.

Slowly, as if each movement causes him pain – and it probably does – Crowley’s eyelids flutter, then open, squinting against the bright fluorescent light. He moves his fingers, bending them this way and that, clears his throat feebly, and then his bloodshot eyes find Aziraphale.

“Angel,” he says with awe, blinking owlishly up at Aziraphale. “You’re here”

And just like that, Aziraphale is _raging._

“What _the hell_ have you been thinking?” he booms, monster up and awake the same very second. “I can’t even – Christ, Crowley, do you want to get discorporated, is that what this is?!”

“Jesus, quiet down,” Crowley mutters, his fingers massaging the side of his head. He must be having a headache, Aziraphale realizes with malicious glee. _Excellent._

“Don’t you dare tell me to quiet down!” He yells, glad to see Crowley wince at the volume of his voice. _Serves him bloody right._ “Have you completely lost your mind?!”

Crowley scoffs, huffs, shakes his head. Then his eyes seem to have found the syringe still attached to his arm like a rusty nail in a piece of timber, and he flushes. Then he narrows his eyes at Aziraphale.

“Did you sober me up?” he hisses in tone of great betrayal. Aziraphale chokes on his righteous anger at the goddamn _audacity._

 _“Did I— Of course, I sobered you up, Crowley!”_ He shouts, his voice echoing against the bathroom tiles. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?!”

Crowley’s face darkens, then closes off. The mask he puts on, instead, is one of neutral courtesy.

“And what business is that of yours, Aziraphale?” he says coldly. “I don’t recall you ever being that interested in the ways I prefer to get off. What’s a little more recreational drug use?”

“Recreational drug use?!” Aziraphale repeats, feeling like a parrot. “This is – what, exactly, is it, Crowley? Heroin? Amphetamine? Cocaine?”

Crowley raises one eyebrow at him. “ _Look at you!_ When did you become such an expert?”

“It’s dangerous, Crowley! And you perfectly well know that!” Aziraphale accuses. His heart is cacophonous in his ears, and he can barely shout loudly enough to drown out the sound of it.

“What I do know,” Crowley says slowly, dangerously, “is that you had no right barging in here, uninvited, fixing me like some damaged goods with a wave of your immaculate angelic hand!”

Aziraphale blinks. His heart skips a beat, then continues full force.

“ _What_?”

There’s a thick heavy silence that seems to go on for a lifetime. The mood between them is oppressive, and Aziraphale can’t think of much to say, can’t think of anything remotely sane to answer to Crowley’s inane statement. He was wrong to expect Crowley to be passive-aggressive, though. The aggression he’s getting at the moment is full on vibrant and enthusiastic and _rather_ _active_.

“I’ve never said you’re damaged! Or that you needed any fixing!”

“I bet you’re wishing you could fix me right now,” Crowley says shrewdly, yellow eyes turned to slits as they bore a hole in Aziraphale. “Maybe punch me in the face, to emphasize your self-righteous wrath.”

“I’m not going to punch you, Crowley, don’t be stupid.” He shuts his eyes, counts to ten in his head. He can’t help noting the absurdity of it all, the situation rapidly unravelling between them. He can’t believe it was him who’s found the other with a drug needle in his arm, and yet he is the one on the defence right now.

“Oh yes, unlike me, you’re too good to just _force_ some sense into anyone!” Crowley says with a grimace, as if disgusted by the notion. “What is it that you do? _Push slightly in the right direction_ , isn’t it?”

“That’s because I don’t need to actually harm anyone to prove my point!” Aziraphale bellows, and a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste shake and rattle on the shelf under the mirror. The monster growls and chews on him; he barely pays any attention to it.

“Sure, you don’t, why would you?” Crowley croaks out, shaking his head, as he lets out a rusty ugly laugh. “When you’re perfectly aware that you have _me_ at your beck and call, doing all of your dirty work for you, wrapped around your finger like a – like a—”

He lets out a pained little sound as his voice cracks, too distraught to even finish the sentence. Detached, Aziraphale studies his face, so painfully familiar and yet so unbearably distant: the sickly paleness, the hollowed-out cheeks, the deep bluish circles under his eyes, the lines stretching over his face like spiderweb. Crowley has never looked this tired, this _old_ before, as if, suddenly, he was aging on an accelerated schedule.

All fight in Aziraphale evaporates like smoke in the wind.

“Crowley,” he says quietly, waiting until the demon looks him in the eye. Crowley’s eyes are screwed shut, breathing loud and erratic. “ _Crowley_ ,” he says again.

But then whatever internal struggle Crowley has been having seems to be over. He lets out a long shaky breath and looks Aziraphale directly in the eye.

“Get out,” he lets out, barely a whisper. The monster howls between them so loudly, Aziraphale can’t quite believe he’s the only one hearing it.

“Crowley –”

“I said, _get out,”_ Crowley repeats, louder and firmer. His face is void of any expression, eyes unblinking. “Now.”

Aziraphale’s heart hurts at that. He can’t believe he’s let this spin so far out of his control.

“Please, my dear—”

“Get the fuck out, Aziraphale!” Crowley snaps, and finally raises himself up on his feet. Aziraphale has failed to note they both have been sitting on the floor up to this point. Now Crowley is impossibly tall as he looms over Aziraphale, his hand pointing to the door. “I swear to— Just _leave_.”

There’s an unsettling note of finality in his tone, and as much as Aziraphale is not finished with this conversation by any means, he’s learned to make concessions a long time ago.

He gets up, legs shaky and cotton. Slowly, he makes his way to the front door, hoping against hope, that Crowley will change his mind and call him back.

He doesn’t. Aziraphale leaves.

***

Absence can warp the mind, make you exaggerate the virtue and minimize the defects of the missing individual. Aziraphale understands that, logically, he does; still, he can’t help falling in the trap anyway. He misses God. Specifically, he misses the _feeling_ of missing God. God, who is almighty and powerful and just. The absence feels like a missing limb, sometimes, the phantom pain of it keeping him up on the rare occasions he tries to sleep.

He dreams once – for the first time in his long and eventful life – and in the dream, there’s a secret door in his bookstore, a door that’s never existed in real life. He swings it open. Behind it, he sees the face of God, and that is what breaks him.

“Why do you do it?” Aziraphale demands, his only chance to get some answers to lifelong questions, that have been nagging at him like festering wound at the back of his mind.

 _I don’t do anything,_ God says, the booming voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.  _People do it all by themselves._

“WILL YOU TAKE ANY RESPONSIBILITY!?” Aziraphale screams at God.

 _No,_ God says simply.

“You have to! There has to be a reason!” he yells, and his voice cracks. “There has to be something, all that pain, all that suffering – there has to be _something!”_

 _No,_ God says again, and there’s that.

“Everything I ever did, all the suffering I went through!” Aziraphale cries, sobbing out the words like an earthquake inside his very soul. “Everything I’ve ever denied myself!” Crowley’s face, unbidden, flashes before his eyes. “I did it because there had to be a reason! I did it all _FOR YOU_!”

 _For you for you for you,_ his voice echoes in the giant empty hall like mockery.

 _No,_ God says for the third time, and there’s a note of finality. _You didn’t do it for me. You did it, because you thought I was judging you. I’m not._

Aziraphale cries and sobs and pants.

_All you did, you did out of your own selfishness._

_You did it for_ yourself _._

He wakes up, screaming and panting, cold sweat pooling down on his chest, above his upper lip. The voice of God is still booming in his ears.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews help Aziraphale realise he's being a right twat.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He you go, the final part of this painful angsty thing - one part sad, one part pathetic and a dash of porn to spice it up :D  
> Hope you people enjoy reading it - maybe not as much as I enjoyed writing this - but nevertheless. 
> 
> This part contains some smut, beware.
> 
> Happy reading!
> 
> P.S. It's been brought to my attention that the italic font clashes with the regular for some reason, blending into one single word altogether. Now I've looked through this text and fixed it whenever I found it, but I'm sleepy and blind with exhaustion, so do let me know if you find any more of these typos. Ta!

_Now._

He hasn’t seen Crowley in weeks.

He knows he could do nothing and just wait it out like he’s done time and time before. Crowley will come back. Crowley always, _always_ comes back to him, and he could wait for a month or a year or a decade, but Crowley will come back to him. He knows it with absolute unwavering certainty, just like he knows that water is wet, and the sky is blue.

He could use this momentary relapse in their relationship, could take a step back and take the time to collect the cut and broken pieces of himself, scattered across time and space in the indifferent cold world around him.

Aziraphale’s done it before, after all, stepping back into the warm bath of old books and delicious foods, loving it for a month or a year, and then feeling trapped, dying to be with Crowley, missing him and his dry humour, the sunglasses and the long nights and the giggly talks before bed, understanding yet again that this was his real life now, that keeping scores and caring about Heavenly wars and all the good and evil in the world was someone else’s issue now.

Maybe there could have been an Aziraphale, who succumbed to his desires and his defects and Fell, Crowley by his side. Maybe there could have been an Aziraphale, who never met Crowley and lived his live without knowing any desires and defects and suffering and crushing loneliness, made even harder by the fact that he’d chosen it of his own free will.

But mourning those hypothetical Aziraphales is a useless exercise, and so he gives it up.

He is here now and there’s no going back. Wherever he goes, there he is.

He should stop thinking about Crowley. He should stop torturing himself and grieving for the hypothetical Aziraphales and hypothetical Crowleys and worship his own pain, as if one day there wouldn’t be any more of it.

Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside him. His body and mind just keep manufacturing more and more of it, and that will never stop.

There isn’t anyone left, anymore, but Crowley and him. No one is there, watching them. No one will come barging into his store, judging him, punishing him, taking his Miracles and his Grace away from him. No one simply _cares_ anymore.

No one but him.

Still, he isn’t feeling much of anything beyond a dull throb of anxiety, as if his conscience were stuck in the past, tethered to a set of rules and conditions that no longer existed. Aziraphale can’t quite move on from them still, can’t quite believe he’s free to have something for himself now, something he’s craved and yearned for, for so long he doesn’t remember ever not wanting it.

The monster in his chest wails and whimpers and whines every evening Crowley is absent in his store.

He could just wait it out – Crowley always comes back to him in the end. And Aziraphale’s always taken it for granted.

But that is not something he is going to do anymore.

He puts on his coat, locks the store behind himself, and goes to see Crowley instead.

***

1980.

The old warehouse around him looks like it would fall apart with the next breeze of air, the walls crumbling here and there, the ceiling missing almost entirely, raindrops and fungus and rot springing up of the floor.

The smell is atrocious. He debates for a moment whether he should Miracle it away, but in the end, he a part of him wants to experience this in a way Crowley does – smell and filth and everything that comes with.

He holds his breath, starts moving carefully around the scattered bodies on the floor – some of them fidgeting ever so slightly, groaning and feverish, and some still and unmoving, high off their brains. He makes his way to the lone figure lying in the corner of the ice-cold warehouse on the nasty self-made mess of sheets, filthy and stinky, what seems like a myriad of syringes scattered around him. The body is still, too still to even look alive, and cold sticky dread clenches around his heart.

He wants to cry suddenly. The monster wails inside him.

He crouches by the body on the floor, takes in the sight in front of him – syringes and spoons and band-aids lying around in a foot-tangling mess, like a little barrier Crowley has put up between him and the world around. He reaches out, puts his hand gently on Crowley’s shoulder, squeezes ever-so-lightly.

“Crowley,” he whispers, afraid to hear his own voice, as if that would make everything around him more real somehow. The wind is rustling the trees outside, a loud booming sound that echoes on the barely standing walls of the warehouse. In the quiet of the room, he can hear the erratic breathing of the numerous people around them, mice scattering in the walls. “ _Crowley.”_

Crowley looks dead. There are dark purple shadows around his closed eyes on his hollow white face, features seeming sharper than ever. His torn and sweaty clothes hang off his frame like they are ten sizes too big for him. He’s lost so much weight he looks like porcelain copy of himself. He smells poignantly of vomit and excrement and urine.

He looks so much like those men did – in a camp in a war-torn Poland, almost eighty years ago – broken and torn and degraded, Aziraphale squeezes his eyes shut so as not to look at him for a second longer.

This pain cannot be survivable, he thinks, as the beast in him cries. This pain is not survivable.

The monster shakes and trembles, and then the wall of the warehouse creaks and crumbles to the floor.

The people around them don’t even _wake_.

Crowley, though, looks like he’s struggling to open his eyes, eyelids thin and almost transparent as he tries to focus his gaze.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale lets out with a sob, hands clutching Crowley’s shoulders as if he might go anywhere. “ _Crowley”_

Crowley focuses his wayward eyes on Aziraphale’s face, blinks slowly and owlishly up at him. His eyes seem to have lost all the bright yellow that used to shine at Aziraphale before, and now they gaze up at him unseeingly, pupils blown wide and black.

“Angel,” it’s barely there, not even a word, but Aziraphale hears anyway.

“ _What have you done to yourself,”_ Aziraphale says, voice breaking, and there’s something hot and wet running down his face. He wipes it away angrily, his vision blurring. Crowley’s eyes drift closed again, and Aziraphale gives him a desperate shake.

“Am I dead?” Crowley croaks out, eyes still shut, and Aziraphale’s heart _shatters_.

He lets out a breath he hasn’t realized he’s been holding, blinks the hot wetness out of his eyes.

“No, no, Crowley, you’re not dead, if course, you’re not dead, come on now,” he babbles, a clot of unspeakable dread and horror and despair building in his gut. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here, please!”

Crowley doesn’t move, his head lolling down to his chest as if it weighed a ton and was impossible for Crowley to keep holding up. Aziraphale shakes him again, almost violently, his own heart beating wildly in his ears – or maybe it’s the wind hallowing against the crumbling building.

“Crowley, _please!”_ he begs, almost shouting now, as the junkies around them moan and swear quietly. Desperately, he runs his hands all over Crowley, miracles the drugs away, miracles the high away, Crowley’s skin feverish and sticky under his fingers.

Nothing happens. Helplessly, Aziraphale looks down at his own hands, wonders if the miracles worked or not, if his privileges have been somehow taken away. Crowley’s tongue darts out of his mouth, unglues his bloody cracked lips.

“I can’t,” he rasps.

“What? You can’t— _what_?” Aziraphale rants, hands shaking as he lifts Crowley’s head by the chin to make the demon meet his eyes. “Please, my dear, _please,_ just let’s go, let’s go home—”

“ _I can’t,_ ” Crowley rasps out again, chest heaving with the effort.

“But _of course,_ you can!” Aziraphale almost shrieks, helpless and desperate, and unable to comprehend what’s going on. “Let’s just –”

“ _Angel,_ ” Crowley cuts him off, and there’s something horrible and wrong in his voice as it cracks. “ _I can’t, I just can’t, I can’t—”_

And then his feeble voice shatters and fades away, as his whole body shakes up with sobs. Terrified, Aziraphale watches him shake and tremble, tears running down his thin narrow face.

 _I can’t I can’t Angel please I can’t I don’t,_ Crowley is saying, barely comprehensible between the sobs. Mute and horrified, Aziraphale gathers him in his arms, lets Crowley’s head roll into the crook of his neck right under his chin. He feels the feverish warmness radiating off Crowley into his skin, feels the trembling rocking his body against Aziraphale’s like an epilepsy episode. He squeezes his arms as tight as they would go around Crowley’s frame, the thought of letting go never even crossing his mind.

He’s never going to let Crowley go, anymore, he thinks feverishly, nose buried in Crowley’s greasy unwashed hair. He’s never letting him go again.

Eventually, Crowley’s sobs slow and then die out, his death grip on the front of Aziraphale’s shirt fades and loosens. Ungluing their sticky bodies, Aziraphale realizes that Crowley has sobbed himself right to sleep – his eyes puffy and swollen, nose red, mouth hanging slightly open. His head lolls onto Aziraphale’s shoulder, touches against his tear-soaked shirt.

Aziraphale loves him _impossibly_ , the kind of love that completely and utterly fucking _destroys_ him.

Slowly and carefully, he gathers Crowley in a way that won’t disturb him or wake him and picks him up. Crowley’s always been a thin wiry creature, but now he feels like a paperweight figure of himself in Aziraphale’s arms, almost weightless as Aziraphale carries him out of the warehouse through the foot-tangling mess of bodies and clothes and syringes and pipes and garbage lying around.

 _Let me help you,_ he thinks desperately, helplessly, as the ice-cold wind outside feels like cuts against his face. He wraps Crowley in his own coat, trying to at least shield him from this, spare him at least some of the bloody pain, be it a miserable tiny thing like this. He hasn’t been there when it counted, though, and that’s entirely on him.

This pain is not survivable.

***

He makes Crowley stay at his place, a tiny old flat above the store that’s stuffed and miserable – not that Crowley’s resisting. Crowley is pliant and distant, disinterested in his own whereabouts and uncaring for anything at all, as he seems content to be left lying on top of Aziraphale’s bed.

Except for one thing.

“Don’t,” he says sharply, as Aziraphale raises his hands, wishing to miracle it all away. He should have known, though, he should have understood.

Even his miracles can only go so far.

“But –”

“No,” Crowley says, closes his eyes. He is sweaty and shivering ever so slightly. He looks horrible. “No miracles, Aziraphale.”

“Crowley, you are _an addict_ ,” he says tentatively, terrified. His heart is beating painfully hard in the tips of his fingers. “You must realize, it’s going to be awful otherwise. It’s going to hurt you _like hell_!”

Crowley smirks tonelessly, and Aziraphale can see the pain in his eyes, the visceral, pleading look behind the bluster.

“It’s already hell.”

***

The days of the detoxing that follow stay with Aziraphale for decades afterwards, something he tries hard to forget and yet springs up whenever he closes his eyes, burned into the back of his eyelids. If Crowley were anybody else, it wouldn’t have impacted him so much, but it was, and it did.

He leaves the door to the bedroom open, so he can always hear what’s going on, and come at once if needed. Not that Crowley’s coherent enough to make the request. Aziraphale is there, anyway.

Eventually, he just gets in the habit of talking at Crowley, response or no, and it's kind of better than it was before, when it started. The thick woollen layer of silence isn't quite so heavy, - broken only by Crowley whimpering and moaning and whining every now and then - and Aziraphale has something to entertain himself in between all the retching and passing out that Crowley does. He tells Crowley about the customers that come in, recites him the first volume of _War and Peace_ , comes up with a theoretical trip around the French countryside that can never really happen, describing the parks they would visit, the ducks they would feed, the benches they would sit on, basking in the warm glow of the French sunny summer. Sometimes when he's had too much vintage wine, he talks about other things, about God and Heaven, and watching Crowley almost dead on the floor, and losing pieces of himself and the blood on his hands and Crowley I don’t think I can do this, and Crowley I don't know how to take care of someone I'm not that person anymore

He isn’t sure Crowley hears him. Not that it matters.

Sometimes, when the pain is too much, Crowley is there in his arms, trembling violently, his skin feverish and sweaty, teeth clattering so loudly Aziraphale can hear. He runs his hands over Crowley’s back, smoothing circles against his hot skin, and he prays.

He hopes it’s not too late, still.

He wonders, during those nights, while Crowley is crying and sobbing and hallucinating, if Crowley himself even knows why he’s doing it like this, what is it that he’s punishing himself for. And this has to be some sort of punishment, Aziraphale realizes, distantly, as he wipes away another pool of vomit at the side of the bed – he doesn’t miracle it away; if Crowley wants to do it the human way, he will, too.

Crowley _is_ doing it the human way, has always been. Suffering and punishment have always been a human prerogative, and Crowley has adopted it seamlessly, to perfection. The alcohol, the drugs and now this – it’s a lot of self-punishment for one person, Aziraphale thinks. He wonders what it is that Crowley’s done to warrant such pain and suffering onto himself, what he thinks he’s done to deserve it. He wonders if Crowley will ever tell him.

 _Aziraphale,_ Crowley moans in his feverish restless sleep, and he sits on the side of the bed – sheets moist with sweat and dried vomit – and takes Crowley’s shaking hand in his.

 _Please, no, please,_ Crowley sobs, eyes shut and face twisted, and Aziraphale isn’t sure if it’s a nightmare or a hallucination. He laces their fingers together, squeezes them tight, bears through another fit of Crowley’s cries of _please_ and  _don’t_ and  _Aziraphale_ and  _I can’t I can’t I can’t_

 _I’m here, darling,_ he whispers, the invisible haze of stale grief and chronic insomnia thickening the air, causing him to talk more softly and move more tentatively than he normally would. In the darkness of the room he allows himself this one little luxury of calling Crowley a pet name.

 _I’m not going anywhere,_ he says. And:

_I’m never leaving you again._

***

_Now._

It’s an unbearably long moment to wait as Crowley opens the door for him. He looks dazed and groggy, like Aziraphale has just awoken him from a long afternoon nap.

“Aziraphale,” he says, somber, looking him up and down. Then steps aside to let him in, looks up at him with piercing yellow eyes. “Why are you here?”

Aziraphale halts to a stop. A million times has he imagined this moment, could see himself heading out the store and then striding into Crowley’s flat full of purpose, but his fantasy always petered out right there. Now he just stands there dumbly, eyes boring into Crowley’s, greedy for the sight of his face.

“I, uh,” he says stupidly, suddenly in this moment unable to come up with anything at all to say, “um, well, I—”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley cuts him then, and he looks as old and ancient as the Egyptian pyramids. He sighs heavily, closes his eyes, rubs the bridge of his nose. And then:

“I love you,” he says simply, but there’s the weight of the entire world in his voice. “I love you so much, it hurts.”

The apartment is quiet around them, the only sound the monotonous _tick tock_ coming from the kitchen, and there’s something awful in his heart, something crushed and aching at the core of him and bleeding outward. Crowley is looking right at him, resigned and tired, as if he was a criminal waiting for a verdict.

Suddenly, there are no more reasons in Aziraphale’s mind, no more God, no more angels, no more pending apocalypse to blame for his own cowardice and selfishness. All those excuses now feel like ancient history, a relic from a lost civilization.  

The whole song and dance routine they had practised to perfection between them, like a choreographed dance, now mostly feels like a bad habit to him, a ritual that has outlived its usefulness, a smoke screen to distract him from more serious questions and troubling emotions.

Well, there’s nothing to distract him now, not anymore.

 

***

The third night of the detox, Aziraphale wakes up to find himself wrapped around Crowley like a straitjacket. Crowley feels too bony, and Aziraphale has a moment of sadness for the long and lithe man the demon used to be. There are plenty of other things for him to mourn, but then Crowley shifts and starts thrashing in his arms.

 _Easy, easy,_ Aziraphale whispers hotly in his ear, one arm coming around Crowley’s middle to hold him. Crowley’s eyes fly open, unseeing.

“My wings—” he chokes out, and Aziraphale knows he’s hallucinating again. “ _Please_ , my wings—”

And then he screams, the sound raw and horrible and wrecked. Aziraphale tightens his arms around the thrashing bony body, _shushes_ and _tsks_ , and rocks him back and forward. Crowley cries and cries and cries.

“ _No, please, please, no_ ,” he sobs out, and once again, Aziraphale can’t help but wonder why Crowley has insisted that he must go through this. What on earth is he punishing himself for? What on earth could he have done that could have been so wrong, because as far as Aziraphale is concerned – Crowley is perfect. Being a demon, Crowley still manages to be a better person than Aziraphale is – to be his _favourite_ bloody person.

He brushes a finger over Crowley’s bobbing Adam apple, runs his hand through Crowley’s red hair, squeezes him even tighter still – it’s not like Crowley’s going to mind the intrusion into his personal space at the moment.

Crowley thrashes again as if he was being tortured. “ _Please, don’t_ —” he hiccups between his sobs. “ _Aziraphale, please_ —”

The monster growls and bares its teeth like it’s going to rip his throat out, but Aziraphale pays him no mind. There’s no way he could know what Crowley’s hallucinating right now, which situation is playing out in his tortured mind, which of the times Aziraphale’s _hurt_ him it’s replaying. He crushes Crowley closer, touches the tip of Crowley’s long straight nose, holds his wrist in his other hand, finds Crowley’s racing pulse point. It’s maddening, touching him like this, being so close to him, while Crowley couldn’t be any further away at the same time.

 _Aziraphale Aziraphale Aziraphale_ , Crowley is crying out in his arms, like his own personal world is crumbling to pieces around him, invisible to Aziraphale.

 _I’m here,_ he whispers into Crowley’s ear, unsure if that would bring Crowley peace of more devastation at the moment. He strokes his soft hair, strokes Crowley’s quivering stomach, feeling his own twist and cramp. He wishes they could be closer still, wishes to be all over Crowley, around him and in him, solidified into one single body, one mind, and maybe then Crowley would know, would understand, would see everything that he is through Aziraphale’s eyes. Maybe then Crowley would get it into his skull that he is loved, he is treasured, and he is _not expandable,_ not some dirty little secret Aziraphale has to keep hidden from the upper management.

 _I love you so much,_ he thinks, the thought ancient and dusty in his mind. _I love you so much it hurts._ It is like an itch—a physical compulsion—this  _need_ for Crowley, itching and itching and itching.

Aziraphale never had an itch he didn’t scratch.

The monster exhausts itself out and curls in a ball in his chest.

***

_Now._

“Crowley,” he manages to say, before his throat closes up, and he chokes on air.

Crowley lets his eyes fall shut. “Don’t,” he says in a small jittery voice. “Just _don’t_.”

“Don’t what?” Aziraphale almost splutters.

“Don’t say it,” Crowley snaps. “I don’t want you to say anything.”

“Well, what do you want, then?!” Aziraphale bellows, suddenly angry beyond reason. The beast inside him claws at his heart painfully.

“I want you to fucking _be here_ , Aziraphale!” Crowley snipes, voice steadily gaining volume.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he inquires, raging at Crowley, at himself, at the whole world around them. He can’t believe Crowley is making this be unnecessarily more complicated than it is. The monster growls, rearing up, gnaws its huge teeth.

“You think you’re with me now, Angel, but you’re not,” Crowley says bitterly, bites his lip hard. “God, Heaven, whatever it fucking is with you, but you’re always too far away.”

“That’s—that’s just not true!” Aziraphale exclaims, indignant. “I’m right here, Crowley!”

“You think you care about me,” Crowley continues as if he hasn’t heard him. “And you might actually think it’s true on some level, as far as you can care about someone like _me._ ”

“Not _this_ again!” Aziraphale snaps, the monster barely under control anymore. He fears to think about whatever might happen if he finally loses control. “I told you—”

“Yes, yes, you’ve _told_ me,” Crowley says testily and waves his hand about. “You say lots of things, Aziraphale, you always have something to _say_. But the thing is – you are cold, and you’re just so fucking _detached_ you might as well have been somewhere else.”

He lets the monster go.

The walls shake, and the glass windows explode, and the world starts to spin around him. Crowley is violently thrown across the room, his back hitting the far wall, the framed painting of Monet hitting the floor with a loud _crack_. In one giant leap, the monster jumps across the room, bends over Crowley’s body, growls and wails in his face, the pain of the world coming out of its mud. As if through him, Aziraphale feels the heat of Crowley’s body, the strain with which he’s holding himself up, the rapid quickening of his pulse.

 _Stop,_ Aziraphale commands the beast as it’s about to do something unforgivable and unfixable. It wails louder, breathing hot and wet onto Crowley’s face, and Aziraphale is thrown that Crowley cannot even feel it.

And then the monster spins around and just lays down on top of Crowley, its humongous body covering the demon up, as it settles.

Sure enough, Crowley feels _that._

“What—What is that—Aziraphale, what—” he splutters, hands waving around as he struggles to lift himself off the floor.

Aziraphale stares at them dumbly, the monster flickering in and out of existence, there on top of Crowley and gone in a flash and there again the next moment. He must be going mad, after all.

“I have a monster in my chest,” he blurts out, words out before he can stop them.

“What—” Crowley tries to say again, the weight of the monster pinning him to the floor.

“There’s a monster inside me,” Aziraphale says quickly, like pulling the band-aid off.

“What are you talking about?!” Crowley bellows, trying to push the invisible weight off his body. Aziraphale can sympathize with that.

 _Off_ , he commands the monster and just like that, it’s gone. Crowley must feel the weight being lifted and he scrambles to his feet shakily.

“What the hell was that?!” he demands in a high voice, and for a moment Aziraphale feels like they are going to have another go at this old argument of theirs, the little play of _what’s wrong’s_ and _I’m fine’s_ , and he blinks a few times.

“I’m not cold,” he says in a jittery voice, hurt against all reason, “And I’m not detached.”

There is a melancholy weight in his chest, as if they’d skipped right past the most important conversation to the disappointment afterward. “When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place,” he whispers. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do the last couple of centuries.”

Crowley’s face shatters and crumbles. His hands twitch at his sides, as if he’s struggling to keep them there.

“Aziraphale—”

“There’s something wrong with me,” Aziraphale whispers, trying hard to get the words past the gigantic lump in his throat. He feels his eyes swell and get wet, blinks the upcoming tears furiously away. “I’ve had this—this _thing_ in me for so long now, and it’s been destroying me”

Crowley is looking at him like he’s a Rubik’s Cube.

“I don’t know— I don’t see how to fix it,” Aziraphale goes on, his voice a tiny broken sound. He doesn’t have the energy to be embarrassed about that. “It’s huge and it’s powerful, and takes about everything I have in me to keep it under control most of the time. Because when I don’t—when I can’t… people get hurt, _you_ get hurt.”

He pauses, wipes at his face again with shaky hands, gulps for air as if he’s not getting enough of it.

“I—” he swallows hard, mouth sour. “I’ve _killed_ a person.”

Crowley lets out a long breath, looks away. “Yes,” he says quietly, “Me, too.”

The silence that follows is deafening. His hands are clasped together almost painfully, he notices, but they feel huge and leaden, so heavy he can barely pry them apart.

Saying all this out loud for the time has felt liberating, like a burden being lifted off his shoulders. For decades he’s been grieving for a God who didn’t really exist, at least not in the way he’d imagined. Now that knows the truth, he can see that he’s lost a little less than he thought he had, which almost feels like getting something back.

He swallows the bile in his throat, makes himself meet Crowley’s familiar yellow eyes.

“I love you so much, it hurts,” he breathes out, words feeling sour in his mouth as he echoes them back at Crowley. Crowley’s expression breaks and melts away. “I’m saying—It _hurts me_ to love you, Crowley. But I still do. I never knew how not to.”

Crowley’s legs seem to give up on him, and he plops on the floor right on his arse. He looks like he barely notices, his eyes glued to Aziraphale, face open and so, so vulnerable.

“Aziraphale—” he rasps out again and stops short, as if not able to figure out what to say.

Aziraphale makes himself move, slowly walks up to him, as if Crowley was a spooky wild animal, looms over him. Crowley looks up at him with an expression so soft and so pained, he takes Crowley’s chin in his hand, runs his thumb along the line of Crowley’s jaw. Crowley’s eyes fall shut, as he leans into his hand like a touch-starved kitten, letting out a tiny little sound.

“I never told you this – not because I didn’t trust you, my dear,” he says quietly. “But because I’ve been afraid you’d think less of me, afraid to hurt you more than I already have. I’ve been afraid of lots of things, really.”

Crowley looks up to him with such tenderness it’s almost unbearable to not look away.

“I’ve never thought you were a coward—” Crowley starts, defensively, always having his back.

“Thank you, dear fellow,” he smiles sadly, “doesn’t mean I haven’t been one anyway.”

His hand slides up to cup the side of Crowley’s face, thumb caressing Crowley’s soft cheek as he intakes a breath sharply, closes his eyes again, leans into the touch. Aziraphale’s hand is burning where the skin touches Crowley’s.

“I was so scared—” Crowley says and chokes on the words. His eyes are still shut, as if it’s easier for him to get the words out if he’s not looking at Aziraphale. Yet again, Aziraphale wonders how on earth he could have missed that – Crowley’s loud, brash, impertinent appearance that only ever functions as a form of protective camouflage in the world that’s out to get him, that’s cold and indifferent to Crowley’s soft fragile soul. “I couldn’t—for so long, I just kept thinking about you back in—in the _forties_ , just— _God,_ Aziraphale,” he shakes his head, eyes shut. “The way you looked and, and _felt_ —Christ, I was scared out of my mind, and you were so out of it, and you lost all your weight, looked like you came straight out of Auschwitz yourself, I couldn’t even—”

He winces, hangs his head low against his chest, like the memories of those days are physically hurting him. Aziraphale can relate to that.

“You should have seen yourself back in 1980,” he says and fights against the images of Crowley lying on the filthy floor of the gutter flashing before his eyes. “I never thought it could hurt so much, to see you like this.”

“It’s okay to hurt, Aziraphale,” Crowley whispers, finally meeting his eyes, and gratitude spreads through Aziraphale’s body like a burden getting lifted, the sense of homecoming that follows, like he suddenly remembers what it feels like to be himself.

“ _Darling_ ,” he whispers, as he crouches down without thinking, body burning and yearning to be closer to Crowley. Crowley flinches visibly at the word, looks at him with awe and wonder, as if a miracle were unfolding before his eyes. Aziraphale cups his face – so familiar, so dear – in both of his hands, brings their foreheads together, their breaths mixing between them.

“Your monster,” Crowley whispers tentatively, as if afraid to push too far and break this moment between them. “Does it want to, uh, kill me, then?”

“No,” Aziraphale breathes out with a faint chuckle, “ _You_ , I think, it actually quite likes.”

And then he closes the final distance between them and kisses Crowley full on the mouth.

And all those years and decades of wondering if he’d be able to maintain his composure, to detach himself from petty emotions like jealousy and anger and keep his mind where it belonged, firmly fixed on the world to come – they all fly out the window with the last shreds of his modesty.

Crowley flails, hands coming up to grasp Aziraphale’s shirt in a vice grip, as if afraid Aziraphale might vanish into thin air. He opens his mouth, lets Aziraphale’s tongue push inside, melting in his arms, little moans of wonder escaping him, as if he still can’t quite believe this is actually happening.

“Darling,” Aziraphale says again, just for the sake of saying it, the word tasting like Crowley in his mouth, and Crowley makes a choked noise.

A new kind of desire bursts through him, so strong and powerful, it pushes everything else out of his mind. So—silently, silently, any words and he'll lose this—Aziraphale leans forward, hands clasping Crowley’s face still, and he kisses and licks at Crowley’s neck, Crowley’s ear, Crowley’s jaw – anywhere Crowley would let him. The burning in him intensifies, the warm liquid pulling low in his stomach, and suddenly he’s going crazy with desire, like he’s an addict and Crowley is the most wonderful powerful drug on earth.

There’s tension in the electrified air between them, dark and twisted, as they kiss and lap at each other almost blindly, a wet mix of tongues and mouths against each other, silent but for the sounds of their erratic ragged breathing.

Aziraphale reaches for Crowley’s collarbone, kisses along it, and Crowley lets out a whine low in his stomach – and that’s it, silence broken. The position they’re in feels uncomfortable now, like an obstacle in this great path of newly-found passion, and Aziraphale pushes Crowley down to the floor, climbs on top of him.

He breaks off for a moment, panting, and he suddenly realizes he is hard and not sure what’ll happen next. He’s been aroused before, naturally – Aziraphale enjoys the world of human pleasures a bit too much, perhaps – but not like this, never like this, not even close.

Crowley is panting heavily bellow him, looking up at him with trust and tenderness and love and desperation and everything Aziraphale can’t even begin to identify. He can hear Crowley’s ragged breaths and thinks, _I did that_ , and Crowley’s body is still for a moment before he reaches up, breathes out a desperate _please,_ and pulls Aziraphale down by his neck, kisses him wet and sloppy on the mouth.

“Aziraphale—” barely a whisper, a low rasp, but there’s something painful in Crowley’s eyes, starving-suffering-sorrowful-sacred, and it makes Aziraphale feel like the most powerful person on earth that he put it there. His fingers fumble with the buttons of Crowley’s shirt, and he wants and wants and wants.

“Angel,” Crowley says like a prayer. Aziraphale swallows hard, dizzy with arousal and desire, and lets his hand travel low, past Crowley’s chest, past his stomach until he finds Crowley’s cock, hard and strained against his jeans. He cups him through the clothes and Crowley lets out strained moan. “ _Angel”_

He kisses a line down Crowley’s chest, leaving a wet trail of saliva behind, then misses the soft warmth of Crowley’s mouth, kisses him there like he’s drowning. Crowley’s hand flies up to touch Aziraphale’s cheek, fingers soft where they touch his face. Aziraphale pauses, takes Crowley’s hand in both of his, brings it up to his lips, slowly and tenderly kisses each knuckle. He wants to show Crowley, needs to convey this cosmic feeling of love to him, of absolute worship and adoration, as he put his mouth lightly on another knuckle, lets his lips linger.

Crowley’s expression crumbles to pieces and he lets out a desperate whine, his hips rolling up to brush at Aziraphale’s.

And God, how do humans survive this, how do they ever move past this, this overwhelming earth-shattering intimacy, tenderness, despair. Crowley trembling underneath him, he swears he’ll never hurt him again, never bloody again, a flood of unspeakable sentiments rising into his throat. He opens Crowley’s hand and kisses his palm, a gesture that got outdated a couple centuries ago at least, but Crowley shakes and _wails,_ and God is that a turn on.

“I love you,” he whispers feverishly, as if there wouldn’t be another chance to say these words again. “I love you, I love you so much—”

Aziraphale has only a general idea of how this is supposed to go, so he follows Crowley’s noises, figures he's doing well enough when Crowley can't stop moaning, can’t stop writhing under him. Aziraphale’s shaking hands finally manage to get the buttons open, and he gets the shirt off Crowley, not too careful with the garment, impatient to feel more of Crowley’s skin under his fingers. He kisses Crowley’s pale pink nipples, laps at his bellybutton, feeling feverish and shaky, and he can’t get enough of that, will never get enough.

Distantly, as if it was happening to another person, he feels himself get Crowley’s jeans off. He blinks through the hot haze, looks down at Crowley, takes in the sight before him.

Crowley is all naked now, sprawled out on the cold hard floor underneath him, skin flushed and glistening where Aziraphale’s kissed him, He’s trembling visibly, hands clutching at Aziraphale’s shirt he hasn’t bothered to take off yet, his lips swollen and red, eyes dark with pupils blown so wide, and his cock hard and leaking between them.

He is the most beautiful thing Aziraphale’s tired old eyes have ever laid upon.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley lies pliant and warm and peaceful against him. “You can do whatever you want with me,” Crowley says, voice crushingly loud in the silence of the room, and it’s almost too much. He feels wetness burning at the corners of his eyes, blinks fast to get rid of it.

He looks at Crowley – never takes his eyes off him – this brilliant creature lying under him, trembling with desire so huge Aziraphale feels like it could devour him; Crowley looks like it doesn’t matter to him if his life ends right now – as long as it’s Aziraphale ending it.

“Anything you want, love,” Crowley whispers, eyes glowing in the dark. “You can have it.”

And he wants everything, wants it all to himself, wants Crowley all to himself, to never be able to let go of him again. He wants to be near Crowley, around Crowley, all over him, in him, however the laws of physics would allow for one body to have another.

He reaches a hand down, wraps his fingers around Crowley’s cock, moves his hand, and Crowley flails – so responsive, so trusting, so bloody vulnerable. His other hand reaches further, behind Crowley’s balls, and finds the small puckered hole.

“Ngggfff," Crowley lets out. Then: " _Aziraphale_ ," all quiet.

Distantly, Aziraphale remembers to miracle his fingers slick, and then he’s pushing one slowly inside, and Crowley breaks down and whimpers and whines.

 _Please,_ Crowley is begging, and Aziraphale’s not even sure what he’s asking for. The world is rapidly spinning around them, and Crowley’s voice is coming to him as if through a thick fog, or maybe from underwater. He works Crowley open, until Crowley wails, body jerking upwards and sideways, and Aziraphale cannot hold himself anymore. He can’t even recall getting his pants off, and then he’s pushing into Crowley – one long torturous moment, pleasure thrumming everywhere inside him.

“Please, please, Aziraphale, God, please,” Crowley is babbling, a broken mantra, and then he grinds his cock against Aziraphale’s naked thigh, smearing pre-come there, and God, if that isn’t bloody _filthy_ and _hot_ and  _forbidden_ , a temptation straight out of Hell itself. He has to stop for a long moment, hardly believing the inhuman feeling of _high_ , watching pleasure flit across Crowley’s face in the twilight of the room. Aziraphale rocks into him faster and faster as Crowley arches up against him, arms going around Aziraphale’s neck – bringing him down and close, hiding his wet face in the crook of Aziraphale’s shoulder. Aziraphale kisses him again and again, tries to keep his own weight up on his arms, to not hurt Crowley, never hurt him, never again.

 _My love,_ he babbles into Crowley’s ear, as the demon thrashes and writhes under him, coming completely undone at the words. _My dear, my sweetheart, I love you, I’ve always loved you, you are everything, you’re bloody everything to me, my darling_

“I love you,” he pants out again, desperately, helplessly, wishing to make Crowley know, to make him see – this huge powerful thing inside Aziraphale, bigger than life and Heaven and God Herself, because Aziraphale knows now, like the Oracle has whispered the secrets of the Universe into his ear.

Human life is short and painful and flickers out without fanfare, and that will never change. And it's worth it. Aziraphale understands now.

As he comes, shuddering against Crowley, he feels Crowley’s hips rocking frantically, trying to catch up, and then there it is, whispered—" _God, I love you_ ,” and Crowley stills under him.

There’s the sound of their panting breaking out the silence of the room, and Aziraphale should be coming back down to earth, but it's still so good, too good to even think about moving, and so he doesn’t.

People around him always felt a right to intrude upon his misery, always assumed he would find it comforting to hear that everything that had happened to him and to the world—the annihilation of millions of people at once—was somehow part of God’s plan, God’s _Ineffable bloody Plan_. But maybe, it was. It’s too selfish to think about, in a way, but maybe all that pain and all that suffering and madness haven’t been for nothing, have at least brought the two of them together in the end – two lonely souls with no one but each other to lean on.

The air seemed infused with divine reassurance; he could just close his eyes and breathe it in. The room is almost completely dark around them now, and Crowley’s silhouette is still and unmoving next to him.

“You alright?” he asks Crowley, tightening his grip around Crowley’s middle. Crowley is lying on his back still, and Aziraphale props himself up on one elbow, places a hand on Crowley’s belly.

“Yeah,” Crowley breathes, and there’s an odd note in his tone. “Now what?” he says after a pause.

“I don’t know, my dear,” Aziraphale says honestly, and the words feel liberating as they leave his mouth. He has no idea – what now – and the admission of that is akin to letting go of something hard and painful in his chest, that’s been lodged there for a very long time.

There’s a beat and then:

“You can go, if you want,” Crowley says haltingly. “I’m fine. It won’t break my cold little heart, if you wanted to. Go, that is.”

Oh, Aziraphale thinks. He shouldn’t have been so naïve and stupid as to expect Crowley’s self-esteem to be fixed with only a declaration of love and sex that followed.

“In all honesty, love, your heart is warmer and bigger than mine,” Aziraphale says, and he is not lying. “You might have fallen, but you’re still a better angel than I ever was.”

He can’t see Crowley’s face in the darkness anymore, but he feels him shift, move slightly closer.

“I won’t blame you, if you wanted to leave, Aziraphale,” Crowley says again, quiet and serious. Aziraphale sighs, heart aching for him.

“Haven’t you heard a word I said, darling?” And there it is again, a slight flinch at the word, as if Crowley expects him to be talking to someone behind his back. “ _I love you,_ Crowley. I know it’s taken me thousands of years to realize that, but I promise to make it up to you for a few thousands more, if I have to.”

Crowley says nothing, but moves even closer still, until all of his body is touching all of Aziraphale’s.

“Besides, I think this felt quite wonderful,” he adds, gesturing between their naked bodies. “All things considered.”

Crowley nods somberly, as if to acknowledge all the things that need to be considered. Aziraphale gathers him into his arms again, moves then around, until Crowley is lying on top of him.

“How is your monster?” Crowley says instead. Aziraphale considers it.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly, frowning. There’s nothing more he can add to that – just a feeling of content and pleasant exhaustion being unknotted in his chest. “I can’t feel it right now.”

“Well, must be all this demonic charm,” Crowley smirks, and Aziraphale is glad to see him move on from his insecurities, at least for the time being. “No wonder, though – I’m brilliant! And apparently an amazing beast tamer, as well. You are lucky I even hang out with you,” Crowley finishes with a sly grin, expression too fond and tender.

“Yes, love,” Aziraphale agrees with a smile, and maybe, just maybe, the amount of pain inside him would sometime come to an end after all, would dry and empty out, with Crowley taking all of it away as he does, as he _always_ does for him. He kisses Crowley’s nose, then the crown of his hair. Maybe, they could be alright, after all. “Indeed, I am.”

_The end._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reviews help me consider writing a follow-up story to this (if it's not too self-important of me to assume anyone would want one, anyway)

**Author's Note:**

> Now that was a rather light note, on which to end this part, wasn't it?


End file.
